Sudden slow down after update and Office

[gtp405]

hey everyone,

So I've been using OSX now since September and so far it's been great. Tonight I had to get some stuff done, so I did a mac update and got three updates, one for safari, itunes, and OSX itself. I now have OSX 10.6.2. After that I installed Office 2008 and then played with some freeware for a bit. Nothing big, just some various stuff.

After all this I've noticed the machine is definitely not as responsive as it was. After the OSX update I had to fix some of my personal settings like my background, etc., apparently it got screwed up. Now it seems that applications take longer to load, and the computer just feels sluggish. Is there any issue with any of the OSX updates? I installed Office 2008 right after I updated it so I'm not sure if that may be causing any slowdown but it doesn't seem likely, that's a windows thing.

I thought maybe I picked up some malware, but a scan with iantivirus found nothing. I'm assuming a trojan would show up in my processes right? At idle I have 42 processes and ~180 threads. CPU usage sits close to nothing.

Ideas?