Spinning beach ball of death won't go away.

[Seshan]

I have been getting the spinning beach ball of death when doing basic task like browsing the web and IRC or word processing, etc. It will last about 10-30 seconds and I won't be able to do anything. I used onyx verify my start up volume. It said there was a problem so I fixed it. The beach ball went away for a day or three. And Now it's back. I checked onyx again and it said it was fine. I have also reset my PRAM, Repaired disk permissions. I don't know what to do now. I know onyx can do some other cleaning stuff, But not sure what I should do or just let it do what ever it wants. I have plenty of RAM (4gb), and Hard drive space left (169gb), I'm on a 2.4ghz MBP Unibody.

Any help will be helpful. Thanks

 

[JediMeister]

Open Activity Monitor and leave it in the background while you work on the system. When you get the spinning beachball, bring up the window and see what has red text in the window. As an alternative, start up to safe boot (holding the left shift key on startup), try to duplicate the issue. If it doesn't happen in Safe Boot, your issue is being caused most likely by a startup or login item. Lists/files of such processes can be found in the Accounts preferences pane or in /Library/StartupItems. Remove items one by one and see if your computer returns to working order.

 

[Sun Baked]

Doesn't go away after a restart?

If it does there might be something like a torrent app with a memory leak. Or you loaded something silly like Norton or a HP all-in-one printer driver.

 

[Seshan]

I have had activity monitor open before and when it happens it usually says what ever program on on is not responding. I will try a safe boot.

It does not go away after a restart.

 

[Sun Baked]

Run a repair sequence using Disk First Aid off the DVD, or fsck in single user mode.

Also sounds like a corrupted file directory/catalog.

 

[Seshan]

I did a repair disk before, and that is what fixed it originally, not repairing disk permissions (Sorry I've done to many thing's I'm getting confused) Anyways I booted into the DVD again and tried again but it says the volume was okay.
I did a fsck and it said it was okay.