Sorry, I should have mentioned that. I am running 10.8.3 and still the same issue.
As far “what changed since it was working” absolutely NOTHING!!!
It worked great for me, for about 8 months and then I was working on a project and got the spinning wheel of death and it’s never worked the same since. That is when I started changing things, reformatting drives, upgrading OS, trying new drives, new RAM, uninstall, reinstall, etc etc etc…
I would also like to point out that I am running it stock, meaning no third party plugins or anything. I know this laptop is older (late 2008) but it’s above all of the minimum requirements to run the software and I talk to other people that are flying through projects on the same machine.
Any chance the actual internal hard drive is bad?
I just wish there was someone in the https://WWW that has even heard of this before…