Well, I finally got around to taking this in (I know...I am horrible, I have just been too darn busy and the trusty old powerbook has been working fine), anyway, the Genius ran all sorts of tests on it, booting of from a clean external disk install of leopard and it ran like butter...he also ran hardware tests, etc...nothing...
so he says that I need to a clean install and copy stuff over one thing at a time to see if I can find something causing this....save that, he says it could be the hard disk, even though it passes hardware test...so I am not sure I am any better off than I was before I took it in...lol😛
If anyone has any new ideas, feel free to share 'em with me, I am not looking forward to all of this trial and error testing...