Beach Ball too Often

Turned Spotlight off. Still get sporadic beach ball locking things up … Activity monitor shows kernal_task root jump to the top of CPU usage, and windowserver also seems to spike a bit.

Where do we go from here?
 
After a safe boot and nearly two hours, it seems the ball is under control. The only error message I received upon start up was that my Wacom driver didnt' load.

So, how do we know isolate the issue? Thanks.
 
Look in your Accounts PreferencePane>Login Items. Disable everything in there and try booting normally.
 
By disable, you mean to remove? I will. I had tried logging in as another user a few days ago, without anything I could see in the login items … which did not stop the beach ball activity.
 
Yes, remove, then restart.

If that doesn't help, post what's in these folders;

Library>StartupItems

System>Library>StartupItems
 
Disabled login items - although I couldn't remove Suitcase from the login window … so I quit Suitcase from the dock. Beach ball locked up things again, including the Activity Monitor.

One pane returned automatically to Login when I checked after the ball quit - Microsoft Database Daemon
 
System>Library>StartupItems: Apache, AppleShare, AppServices, AuthServer, CrashReporter, Disks, FibreChannel, IFCStart, IPServices, Metadata, NetworkTime, NFS, NIS, PrintingServices, RemoteDesktopAgent, SNMP
 
/Library/StartupItems: AdobeVersionCueCS2, Macaroni, NortonAutoProtect, NortonMissedTasks, PACESupport, Tablet

I had turned off Macaroni but that didn't stop the beach ball.
 
remove all of these;

AdobeVersionCueCS2, Macaroni, NortonAutoProtect, NortonMissedTasks, PACESupport, Tablet

Trash Nortons, it causes problems.

Restart and see if it helps.

Open Activity Monitor and see if anything from Nortons, Suitcase Wacom, Adobe, etc are running, if so, quit from that window. Restart
 
These item have been there for some time with no problems. I removed them and the Beach Ball hang ups continue. I don't see anything suspicious in the Activity Monitor, except, of course, the kernal_task root suddenly grabbing a lot of cpu power during these surges.
 
Does Disk Utility have S.M.A.R.T Status?
If it does, is your drive verified there?

Since this happens with a new user, I would backup and reformat the drive, reinstall the system and your software, but I'm also thinking the drive may be at fault.

Do you have a second drive installed you can boot from?
 
Smart status on both of my internal hard drives show as verified. Norton had been running without issues for a year … so I don't know if they are the villain here.

I also have OS X on both hd's - booted from the other hd and things ran without the beach ball interruptions. Recall, too, that the issue seemed to stop when rebooting in safe mode. Of course, a clean install is the last thing I want to go through if I don't need to.

Your thoughts.
 
Bite the bullet. Re-install. And maybe load your software programmes one at a time and oberve performance.

Norton may not be the culprit here, but it may screw things up in the future.
 
Another thing I noticed: While system profiler indicates that both hard drives are verified, disk utility shows one drive as unverified. Tech Tools and DiskWarrior do indicate that the drive in question is verified.

Thoughts?
 
Since things the beach ball doesn't appear after rebooting in safe mode, doesn't that imply that something is loading in the regular boot that is causing the issue?
 
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