G4 spinning beach ball

Hi

I have a G4 quicksilver and it's been great up until this morning!!

Certain things seem to be brining up the spinning beach ball, these things so far are: opening safari, text edit, using calculator, disc utility, going into 'user accounts' in system preferences.

These are the things so far that seem to be causing the problem and I've tried various restarts/shutdown and reset my pram. I can't repair my permissions because everytime I go into disc utility and click on my hard drive image I get the spinning beach ball. I've left it spinning for like 10 minutes and the only way to get rid of it is to force quit but then when I go back and try it again the same thing happens.

I'm in a bit of a panic now because Im a frelancer and I work from home and don't have a spare mac, any suggestions before I have a heart attack? lol

that is odd, have you tried booting from the os install disc and using the disk utility there? have you done basic maintenance? try using a third party app like cocktail , repair permissions, run cron scripts, etc. have you recently installed any new software or hardware?

Thanks for the reply, had to take it in for repair and ended up having to have a new hard drive and system install