[Growlyman]

Thanks to everyone who's replied so far. Quite the education I'm getting. I really appreciate it. This afternoon I purchased a chip upgrade for my G4. Looks like the culpret might be the specific G4 model I have. I guess the Mirror Drive Doors is a bottom-of-the-line G4 and there's very limited options in terms of upgrades (as far as I can deduce so far). I ordered a Giga Design replacement dual-processor chipset @ 1.33 gHz. Yes, OS9 will still only see one processor, but it does nearly double the processing power from the 867 mHz chipset. So hopefully this will soup up 5x (and you're right - I shouldn't be having issues to begin with at the speed of my processor and RAM amount already - not with only 14 plug ins going) and that will take care of the 5x issue.

The other thing I'm going to continue to research is to partition my hard drive and put Panther back on so that I can have PTLE 6.4 still available. This would make me have three bootable OS's but if that's what it takes, it sounds like the best/easiest/least painful fix.

So again, thanks for all the replies so far. I welcome any additional tips anyone wishes to offer.

Growlyman