Automator slowness

I'm not one to complain about sluggish applications, but having used my 12"powerbook 1.5GHz 512mb RAM for nearly a year now, everything has worked as expected but I am finding automator almost unbearable to use!

You're all probably thinking "Get more RAM!" which I do plan on doing when I can afford it, but I don't have this problem in other applications, which is why it's annoying me. Basically, when I'm working on a simple workflow (about 7 actions) the whole app grinds to a halt and even worse grinds the whole OS to a halt. What is it about automator that is so demanding? This is also why I'm annoyed because I wouldn't mind if it was doing anythig particularly taxing!

I know it's a bit of a rant, but I'm still wondering if anyone knows if this is a known problem or if there is a fix?

Thanks

Last week I finally had a use for Automator. I found the same problem you did with about the same number of actions. I found saving my work, quiting and restarting Automator helped.

This Apple discussion says the same thing, with a tip to clear the cache on restart; http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=700273&#700273

As a professional programmer, I really can't see how this product got released. Very poor user response rate is unacceptable. Hopefully Apple will fix it in the future. Can you say OS X 10.5.