Hmmm . . . I appreciate your comments (and am glad I didn't get flamed! I guess the OS X crowd is a more affable bunch than the 9 crowd
)
A friend of mine who runs OS X came over this morning and confirmed that, "for a one gig processor, this is slower than my 500." He checked all my settings to make sure I wasn't running something unnecessarily and confirmed that everything was "lean and mean."
He asked whether I had enough RAM or not, and I said I had 256MB--what it shipped with. He thought that might have something to do with it . . . and now you've confirmed it. No doubt the System is struggling with that little RAM.
Which leads to the next question: how can Apple ship a machine out whose RAM quotient isn't even enough to run the System? What's going to happen when I boot Photoshop and start work on those 40MB files?
And the last question: where's the cheapest place to get more RAM for the new 1G iMac?
--Nick