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IT SEEMS TO BE FIXED!!
Using gerbsen's suggestion of rebuilding the library using iPhoto Library Manager (
http://www.fatcatsoftware.com/iplm/), I came back to iPhoto and there were, literally, more than 200 "... may also be in the photos below" just for me in my library. Other people in the family also have a couple hundred listed each.
For the time being, rebuilding the library, which took 4+ hours on a 3.06GHz iMac for 7600 photos, seems to have done the trick. Rebuilding does make an entirely new copy of your library, leaving your original one intact.
What remains to be seen is if iPhoto continues to work as advertised for Faces functionality.
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This appears to have worked for me. Need to import some more pictures to be certain but the CPU Spike and spinning arrows are now gone