Snow leopard runs slow.. but only in one user profile.

C

collinhead

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I recently updated my iMac 2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo (i think it's the 20" 2007) to Snow Leopard. It's now updated to 10.6.4. My computer has 6 user accounts, and the first thing I was impressed with is how quickly the computer boots up, loads user accounts, and switches between them. On my account, it loads everything almost immediately and I'm very happy about it.

However, on my mom's account, and only her account, everything loads really slow, and everything runs really slow all the time. I'm not sure why.. The only Login Items she has (as reported by system preferences) is iTunesHelper and LMILaunchAgentFixer. I just barely switched to her desktop, (to check out the login items) and I got the color wheel of death for like 3 minutes before I was allowed to click on ANYTHING. The dock wouldn't come up, and I couldn't click on anything at all, then when I could finally click on stuff, it was amazingly slow. She was already logged in, mind you, I had just switched to her desktop. I opened up Activity Monitor, and nothing sticks out. 80% of the CPU is idle, and it says between 7-10% user CPU. The highest using memory and cpu was Safari, which is just sitting on a page on a forum, nothing is moving, no video, nothing.

I'm puzzled as to why this is going so slow, when every other account on the computer is blazing fast. I just repaired disk permissions, and although lots of things were repaired, it doesn't seem to change much on performance. Does anyone have any ideas how I can speed things up on this one user profile?
 
I forget if OS X allows fonts to be installed for specific users only, but that's a possibility. Still, seems like the simple solution here is to just make her a new user account. It's probably just one of those fun instances of profile corruption. Generally pretty rare, but does happen. It could also be some program she installed. On the new profile, make sure you're the one who's installing everything, and space it out over a few days, so you can narrow the problem down to only a couple of possibilities.
 
hey, have you ever found a solution to your issue? I think we have the same situation on our iMac... so I'd appreciate any ideas..
 
Run some software maintenance on your sick account by using Yasu or Maintenance and run all the cleaning routines. Let the program reboot your Mac and upon that reboot, manually reboot again to completely rebuild your startup/shutdown system cache.

Doing this kind of Software maintenance about once every three months IMHO will keep OS X running clean and almost like new.
 
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