I'd like to fix some things.

[Qion]

1. It takes 20 bounces plus loading time to launch Illustrator CS3 from startup.

2. Printing is a bastard thing; Illustrator likes to continue "printing" for 10-40 minutes after the separations have spooled.

3. Switching applications while multiple Photoshop and/or Illustrator files are open is a slow, tedious process.

4. Occasionally, Illustrator will spool to the wrong printer regardless of what driver is selected. When this happens, I get weird results such as B/W seps out of my HP Deskjet.

Other than that, I feel like I'm getting a lot more glitches and random errors than I should. Reinstalling doesn't help. Repairing permissions doesn't help.

My iMac has 1.5GB of RAM, which should be plenty for the majority of what I do at my day job.

 

[Qion]

Anybody?

 

[Giaguara]

How many fonts do you have installed?
When opening Illustrator, keep Console open - it should be telling why it's taking that long to start it.

 

[Mikuro]

Do you see any excessive memory usage in Activity Monitor? Problem 3 sure sounds like Illustrator or Photoshop is going nuts on RAM. Have you checked Photoshop's scratch disk/memory cache settings? (I imagine Illustrator has similar settings as well.)

Clearing your font cache can do wonders sometimes. Apps like Onyx and Maintain make this easy.

 

[Qion]

Thanks, guys. I checked Activity Monitor during a light workflow, with Illustrator and Photoshop open and a couple extraneous applications -iTunes, Calculator, iChat, etc.-, and I had just 64MB of RAM left. That's just a little ridiculous, I think. Unfortunately, I only contract to this company, and they don't exactly have an expansive stock portfolio.

I keep my font library at a minimum, with my 6,000+ fonts cataloged elsewhere on a job to job basis. I'm usually fastidious about routine maintenance, but it's possible that I haven't been doing enough. I'll download Onyx and see if it can help.