Its not 'multi tasking' anymore? LONG

[Andrew]

 I need and want thoughts from the best fellows out there.
Some will remember that I complained my system were behaving strangely:
Jumpy cursor, long loading times, annoyingly unresponsive. All that
appears after a few days of usage. I've been told to maintain my system
properly (of course) which mean to run fsck one in a while, checking out
the running services, looking for 'undesired user(s)' and stuffs like
that. Doing so, I actually found a 'cyrus' thing going (IMAP server??!)
on so I removed all I saw fit. This -> seam <- to have fixed the spam
issue, if this was an issue at all in the first place anyway. 

 Now I have another issue that <cough cough> introduced itself some days
ago. Even tho the Mac in question is a 300Mhz slowputer I know its not
even close to 50% if its potential. YDL3 was pretty much near 100% IMO,
that, even with a monolithic ('y' option instead of 'm' for modules ?)
kernel I compiled with as much stuffs IN the kernel as possible and
running ridiculously too many apps at once, kbuildsycoca, rpm
--rebuilddb, locate -u... Even with all that, my favorite screensaver
(IFS - iterated-function-system) was not 'lagging' like it it do in YD4.
I always have an instance of gkrellm on my screen, in YDL3, nothing
could 'pause' the bars and graphs from moving happily. Now, in YD4, just
to move a xterm window around (with nothing else running then XFce on a
minimalist module-happy kernel) does pause gkrellm. Think of what happen
with MacOS7/8/9 when you hold a menu down.. all is at an halt until you
release the mouse button. This is kinda what's going on here. It feel
like MacOS and I dont expect that from Linux.

 The real questions are, WHAT is going on, WHY is this so and WHAT to do
to make my Linux install a 'Linux' system again. I hope I make sense for
someone. I've read and heard about quite a few ppl wondering why YD4 is
'slower' than YD3. Im sure some will answer 'its designed for the more
recent Macs.'s but I understand a distribution is only a get-together of
packages more or less pre-configured for a specific goal and/or target
audience.

 I've look at all the obvious places and all seam 'normal' but I know
deep in my heart its not. There IS a serious HUG in here and I want to
blow it away.