Finder beachballs when sorting large folder by Kind

Anyone seen this????
Tiger 10.4.3 Finder View by list beachballs when sorting
large folder (500 entries) by Kind.

The "Force Quit" window shows "Finder (not responding)"

top -s 10 -u shows:

Processes: 82 total, 3 running, 79 sleeping... 337 threads
12:30:11
Load Avg: 3.29, 2.57, 2.18 CPU usage: 50.8% user, 49.2% sys, 0.0% idle
SharedLibs: num =222, resident =41.0M code, 4.41M data, 5.39M LinkEdit
MemRegions: num = 21346, resident = 376M + 14.4M private, 191M shared
PhysMem: 113M wired, 463M active, 334M inactive, 911M used, 112M free
VM: 9.09G + 142M 218282(10) pageins, 197514(0) pageouts

PID COMMAND %CPU TIME #TH #PRTS #MREGS RPRVT RSHRD RSIZE
VSIZE
21175 Finder 54.7% 9:24.34 5 241 451 9.37M+ 30.5M- 13.9M-
171M
63 coreservic 27.4% 45:17.21 3 166 247 2.62M- 21.0M- 12.4M-
56.9M-
21131 Acquisitio 5.2% 18:36.95 9 222 414 7.32M 24.5M- 17.6M
161M
26135 top 2.4% 0:01.59 1 18 22 932K 356K 1.36M
27.0M


There is not much in the Console log:
2005-11-21 12:12:19.088 Finder[21175] CFLog (0):
CFPropertyListCreateFromXMLData(): Old-style plist parser: missing
semicolon in dictionary.
2005-11-21 12:12:19.092 Finder[21175] CFLog (0):
CFPropertyListCreateFromXMLData(): The file name for this data might be
(or it might not): Contents/Info.plist --
file://localhost/Volumes/Users/Users/rtilley/Library/Plug-ins/Ziplight%201.0.0/Ziplight.mdimporter/

I'm not sure if Ziplight has to do with this, but am suspicious, since
large numbers of files have become "Ziplight .mdimporter Document"s.
For example:
.DS_Store,
Abc - chinese.gp3
make-map.cgi

These files have blank Type and Creator fields but so do other files
that have not changed "Kind".
For example .zip files are still of Kind "ZIP archive" and .exe files
are still of kind "Executable"

I have tried backup/erase/restore of my user drive with SuperDuper.

.