Sirius: Extreme slowness on iBook

[Paul Sexton]

I didn't see this in the General or Newbies archives, so it must be 
rare or solvable.

I installed 3.0 (downloaded the ISO's) on a single USB (toilet seat) 
iBook: G3/300, 64 MB, no MacOS partitions.  This is a lightly 
customized system (added the development stuff and a few other 
things, deleted most of the server packages), used default 
partitioning.

The install & first boot went fine (took a few tweaks/reboots to 
access my cable modem).  Everything looks good except that launching 
apps is unusably slow.

Any OpenOffice app takes 7-8 minutes (it appears in the task bar 
after 3 or 4) during which the mouse is extremely jerky and takes up 
to 30 seconds to respond to clicks.

Mozilla zoomed open and then nothing happened: I may not have given 
it long enough (it's now been over a day, though.)
Konqueror took about 5 minutes to start, but ran reasonably after that.

I recall once seeing a post on google groups where this occurred on 
YD2.something and an update fixed it.  I ran apt-get (18 packages) 
but it had no effect on the problem, and it isn't mentioned anywhere 
on the site that I could find.

How do I fix this?  I like what I see so far, but it's more like 
running a screen shot than an OS. I'll try a total vanilla reinstall 
unless someone has a better idea.