OSX behaving stranegly and slowly

[JonnyDonovan]

Hi,

Im new to all this but it seems like a lifesaving site - I'm hoping you can help me. Recently my powerbook g4 has slowed down a small but fairly noticable amount. When I start up it behaves normally until arriving at the desktop screen and instead of loading up as normal the small color wheel appears and it seems to stall instead of finishing booting up and showing my desktop icons and my dock items. The top menu does not show itsself fully either with its ggrey color, but only the outline. The drop down menu's still work however, they just don't look right. Only when I start an application does the system seem to finally load up and the color wheel go away, and the top menu fill in its grey color. I tried going to Mac help to find out what was going on - but as soon as I load it up it closes - every time. I looked for a virus scan for mac but couldnt find one - I have my inbuilt firewall running and dont allow my computer to share stuff, i also downloaded a free spyware program and looked for bugs there but found none. Please can you help me solve this problem.
Best wishes,

Jonny Donovan

[markf21]

Clear out cache files in You>Library/Caches these are all temporary files and can be cleared with no affect. Also in the Applications>Utilities folder is Disk Utility. Launch it and click on the name or size of the Hard drive on the left and at the left lower corner of the main window click on repair disk permissions.

[JonnyDonovan]

Thanks for you help!!! Its working much better now.