As I mentioned a couple days ago, I've undertaken the project of wiping clean my Mac and re-installing everything. The system has been acting very sluggish, windows have started forgetting their settings, along with a myriad of other little niggles that have led to a really frustrating experience lately.
I managed to clear of more than 80GB of data from the hard drives (as the 2 inch stack of DVD-R's will attest) and did the re-format and clean install today. The performance difference is notable, all the little annoyances and sluggishness are gone. I'm still in the process of re-installing all my software and getting the last of my data copied back over (the stuff I kept, at least.)
I'm still impressed with how easy it is to back up setting, preferences, and data on a Mac and subsequently restore them on a new install. Bookmarks, calendars, e-mail, passwords, music… all restores in an instant. Another reason I stick with the Mac.
I'm also starting to run my day-to-day account as a standard user rather than the default admin level access OS X gives you, using a second admin account to authenticate with when needed. There's been recent talk of security vulnerabilities that take advantage of an oddity in the authentication schemes to potentially do nefarious things. (My understanding is that if a process requests authentication to do something that requires admin access without checking to see if the active user already has admin privileges, that account will then gain root access, where a user account would just gain the needed admin access.) Nothing in the wild, it's only proof-of-concept so far, but it's a sign to start taking security a little more seriously.
I'd still really like to add some more memory, 512MB just doesn't cut it anymore, but it's not in the budget at the moment. Still, I may breakdown and upgrade it anyway. *shrug*