[flash]

OS 10.3.9 - How/can you get rid of the spinning ball? It has gotten progressively worse in the past few weeks.

[DarthMac]

How much space is left on your HD?

[sandbag1]

I've been getting the same with 10.4.8 and it's getting worse. I have 182 G.B. spare memory on my hard drive. When I get it the only way out most of the time is to power off then back on. I've tried running from an external HD and get the same thing but not as frequent. I tried an archive and install of the OS, still same thing. I repair permissions and I get no error messages from Disk Utility. I run Hardware Test and find no errors. I repaired the directory with Disk Warrior, still the same problem.
Time to bring it back to the Apple store and hope they can figure it out. It's been back 2 times previously for major repairs so I'm going to see if they will replace it. It's a first gen 20" iMac.

[Rcovell]

Do a 'force quit' to jump out of the application that was causing the problem. Then, investigate the reason why you're getting the slowdown.
Bob.

[sandbag1]

As for me and my problem, "Force Quit" will not work, the Force Quit menu doesn't even initiate.

[PeterG]

sometimes, (people don't like to do this) when I've screwed something up, I will pull the power cord from the computer (if no response from any action) give it a few minutes, go back in, do a repair and it has fixed things for me.
But thats me,
Peter