Mac Geekery

My Al 1.67 G4 Powerbook (2g ram) has been suffering from a nasty System slowdown/hangup for a few months. Here is what happens:

After startup I typically open a few utilities such as LaunchBar, TapDex, and iClock and then go about my work. Apps regularly opened are Entourage mail, Safari, Camino,Tex-Edit Word, Quicken, iWeb, Transmit, TACOhtml, and maybe a few others during the day or 3 between restarts.

Somewhere along the line I will notice my System usage climbing north of 50% (I use MenuMeters to monitor CPU, HD use, and Network speeds.) At some point the CPU gets very sluggish as evidenced by the Dock being difficult to access, Cmd-Tab gets slow, and many programs start taking 2-3 times as long to do their tasks. Then I see the System usage go above 90% and the computer becomes unusable due to lack of response.

Sometimes, if I wait it out, the System will drop back to the 50-60% level and I can get to programs to start shutting them down or to Activity Monitor to see what was driving the usage. The only culprit I regularly see taking up a lot of CPU % is a root process called WindowServer (and sometimes SystemUIServer) but I can’t seem to find any documentation on what they do or how they can get hung up. I suspected that Safari was involved with the hangups as I often have many Safari windows and tabs open. I use SafariStand and thought that might have been involved, but even with SS disabled the problem still occurs.

Does anyone have a clue what might be the culprit here?