3-5 second response delay of mouse or cursor

[borgy]

[I've searched here, there and everywhere on this issue.]
This Imac 7.1 2ghz, 20" is less than a year old. I switched because it promised friendlier functioning especially for my wife. I use Parallels for XP/Quicken only. What drives me crazy is a 2-5 second delay for almost anything I do: scroll, copy, move cursor, any art or photo ops and TYPing. I read all the things to reduce the Pinwheel and did them. Finally I added 2 more Gigs of memory (total 4) and it made no difference. Activity monitor shows tons of free memory.
I cannot believe that I use my tiny Asus to type most of my stuff now because on the iMac I can type something then in the middle of a word, count 'one thousand 1-3 then sometimes get a pinwheel for 2 counts and it resumes typing. It does not seem to matter much if I close everything else (wow that eliminates all that handy windows stuff Apple is famous for). For some reason the Apple support forum won't finish my registration, but I see very little online about this kind of problem. Any ideas. Thank you.

 

[SnowLeopard2008]

Which mouse are you using? The wired or wireless version? If it's any kind of wireless mouse, replace the batteries. Same goes for any kind of wireless keyboard.

 

[borgy]

Which mouse are you using? The wired or wireless version? If it's any kind of wireless mouse, replace the batteries. Same goes for any kind of wireless keyboard.

I use the iMac keyboard and a wired Logitech trackball & USB Overdrive as the driver. I mistakenly downloaded a Logitech update which was huge and included drivers for every item they produced. USB overdrive was simple and much smaller. This was happening before that which is why I doubled my memory. I look at the activity monitor but cannot see anything really unusual and it shows 3gb free, 232 g disk space free.

I moved my photos to a firewire external hard drive, hoping that might help.

This kind of problem seems uncommon as I don't see a lot of references to such online. I sure wish I could figure it out. I switched from PCs this year hoping to leave these kinds of problems behind but now I am really, really ignorant about ins and outs of Apple. I try not to mess with it so I don't screw it up but who knows?

 

[borgy]

Hooray I Found It-it Was In Mobile Me

I use the iMac keyboard and a wired Logitech trackball & USB Overdrive as the driver. I mistakenly downloaded a Logitech update which was huge and included drivers for every item they produced. USB overdrive was simple and much smaller. This was happening before that which is why I doubled my memory. I look at the activity monitor but cannot see anything really unusual and it shows 3gb free, 232 g disk space free.

I moved my photos to a firewire external hard drive, hoping that might help.

This kind of problem seems uncommon as I don't see a lot of references to such online. I sure wish I could figure it out. I switched from PCs this year hoping to leave these kinds of problems behind but now I am really, really ignorant about ins and outs of Apple. I try not to mess with it so I don't screw it up but who knows?

I stumbled on a similar problem on the Apple discussions (they still don't log me in): I had activated the trial Mobile Me and in the preferences for that I turned off "Back to Mac" and all is well. So I hope this may help someone else.

 

[borgy]

Upgrade to Snow leopard totally solved the problem

I struggled between wiping and installing fresh but chickened out and installed Snow leopard as upgrade and finally the problem disappeared without my having to go through lots of chancy maneuvers. Thanks for all the input.

 

[MMM.PWR]

Holy bump. Congrats on having your problem solved. Did you bookmark this post? Or is the search that good.

 

[borgy]

Oh NO! The problem returned

Somehow after an upgrade or some program the red ball of death is back driving me crazy. The only program I had changed was an upgrade to the NY Times reader which used Adobe Air. I uninstalled them both but nor improvement.
I thought oh now I can use Time Machine but somehow it had been turned off for 4 months. AAAAgh!
I try to monitor via Activity Monitor but cannot tell which program would be doing this as the active processes jump around but I cannot find a significant change in the size of the program. If I get a big write in io I cannot tell what caused it. Is there some other way to find out such a thing?

I just remembered that I tried VueScan to see if I could use my scanner better. It recognized my scanner but not my driver (which was installed) and they suggested opening it using Rosetta. I've looked to see how to delete it other places here but I think it's time for a clean install. Thanks for any help.