MBP Slowww drop down menus

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Hey all,
I've had my MBP early 2008, 2.4ghz for about a year and a half now. I have always run the maintenance, scripts, repair permissions and everything on a regular basis. I've had snow leopard for a few months now. I'm using about 95/200 gigs on the hard drive. I always keep applications and the os up-to-date. I have a lot of the visuals/eye candy stuff turned off to make everything run quicker. Now my problem.

Recently, I've noticed that the drop down menus, the ones that seem to "slide" out of the title bar, are moving in what appears to be slow motion. For example, in Firefox, when i go to Firefox>Preferences, it will take several seconds to completely slide down. Same thing happens when I close it and it slides back up. It's not just firefox that does this, but other apps as well, ones that have the menu's slide down like that. the pinwheel even pops up sometimes as its happening.

another example, while typing this, i clicked on the icon to insert a picture from URL, and it slid down, taking several seconds to go down and up.

I tried just reinstalling snow leopard to see if it'd fix it, it didn't. Anyone else ever encounter this, or have an idea to fix it? If i could somehow disable the feature all together and have the menus pop up separately like in safari even that would be great.

i attached a screen shot of the menu as its sliding out so you know what i'm talking about. any help would be greatly appreciated!

Slow menus.png
 
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Just so you know, those are called sheets. I'm not sure why they'd be slowing down, though. Try opening TextEdit, typing something, and then trying to close the window without saving. Is that sheet slow as well? If not, I'm thinking this might be a Firefox issue. Are you using the latest version of Firefox. Also, it looks like you are using quite a few add-ons and a non-standard theme. Try disabling some of those things and see if it helps.

Also, when you say that you "have a lot of the visuals/eye candy stuff turned off to make everything run quicker," what exactly do you mean? Did you change anything that isn't in System Preferences—for instance, by typing commands in Terminal? If so, what were they?
 
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Another choice is to add a new Admin User and Log in there to see if u get the same slow down - might point to where to look for problem.
 
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thanks to both of you for your replies.

i am positive it is just not firefox that is doing it. it does it for any applications that require the window to be resized (not sure how to put it). for example, i just opened up onyx, and clicking from one section to the other takes several seconds as the windows slides up and down when moving from section to section (ie. going from verify tab to cleaning tab).

when i used text edit, when the window slid down to ask me if i wanted to save, that was slow; it closed right away after i discarded it. it's like slow motion, sort of like minimizing while holding the shift key. it's not choppy or anything, just slow.

by eye candy i just meant stuff in system preferences, for example no genie effect. i've never used the terminal for anything along those lines.

thank you for the new account troubleshooting idea. i made a new login and fiddled around with some applications. they ran at the normal speeds, no slow motion type stuff. so i guess that means something is screwy with my settings. i just have no idea as to what it could be. i can try and take a video so you can see what i'm talking about if you think it could help. i really appreciate the feedback.

-da
 
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Looks like it could be a corrupt .plist file in your User Library. Try dragging the likely looking ones to the desktop, one at a time then quit User < Apple Menu > and log back into User to see if u got the offending one. If no change you can put back the one on the desktop < keeping your settings > and move to the next one to repeat the sequence.
 
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collin, thanks once again for your reply. i've never dealt with plist files before, in fact this was the first time i've looked in the preferences folder. but reading up on them it seems it could be the culprit. i'm guessing its not an application specific file since it occurs across multiple applications. more likely an apple plist?

i'm just a bit confused on how to spot one that is likely to be corrput...there's 188 of them in the folder. i tried removing the firefox one just to see what would happen...no changes, so i put it back. not really sure how to narrow it down.
 
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If you want to try removing plists, I'd recommend trying com.apple.dock.plist first.
 

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