i am running 10.3.7 on a 466 mhz g4 with 386 mb of ram. the system is on an 80 gb barracuda, and most of my files are on another 120 gb barracuda, connected through an ata-66 controller card. when i first started running this setup a couple of months ago, everything seemed to work comfortably well. it doesn't set any speed records, but it's comfortably quick. recently, i installed, and uninstalled, a few questionable third-party applications and utilities. nothing nasty, just a few odds and ends that didn't work the way i wanted. but the problem is that now, a simple "find file" from the finder just keeps running forever, but doesn't find anything. (e.g. search for filename contains "system" on local disks runs for 10 minutes without finding anything!) i can't tell if my file system is hosed (disk utility and disk warrior 3 can't find anything wrong on any of the 4 partitions), or if it's the system software (reinstalling is a whole bunch of no-fun if it isn't necessary). i have applied all the relevant system software updates to date. apart from the disk utilities, i also tried running the periodic system maintenance scripts, but that didn't seem to make any difference. can anyone offer any helpful suggestions or advice? ........ tom klein ps. please reply to the newsgroup. thanks.