OS X Lion is incredibly slow (even after index)

You know, it could very well be, but the time it takes to troubleshoot all that stuff seems to be longer than just doing a reinstall. NOW...IF when I migrate stuff back I see the same behavior, then I'll have no choice but to do that. However, so far, I've not seen a return to the behavior I experienced before.

The trick is to get one that's perfect then use it as a source. I once had to set up Mac's HDs for every school in an entire Scottish county. I forget the number but it was huge. We set up one so it was perfect then cloned that to twenty HDs and then cloned twenty machines at a time then used those as well and so on ... it took all night and a massive room ... but we did it! 🙂

Would this also work if I'd do a clean install of Lion and then use migration assistent to get my stuff back from a TimeMachine backup?

Got to be worth a try. The admin would have a clean install after this but the users restored from the TM back up would have any added extras in their Libraries I'd assume so if it was a user library with issues you'd be back to sqaure one for that user. However you'd know where the problem was.

Have you tried booting with Shift Key held, wait for Apple Logo then release Shift Key. The Mac will open in Safe Mode, i.e. no extranous stuff. If it is nice and fast you pretty much know it was something added that was causing the problem.

Thanks. I'll give it a try. Booting in safe mode doesn't work on my MBP. It gets to a certain point, around 30% and then it get stuck and doesn't proceed any further.

Do you see a progress bar prior to it sticking, if so did you wait long enough? It can take a long time as it is doing a deep level check and repair, it may not have been stuck just taking a long time. If it were truly stuck I'd boot to an external or the safety volume in Lion (Option restart to select) and run disk utils repairs. Then try again.

Yes, absolutely. That's one of the choices in the Migration Assistant (to use a Time Machine Backup).

You could do, probably, much of what MA does manually, but MA just makes it easier. All it's doing is pulling back your User Account (with all your home folder stuff), your Applications (try THAT on Windows) and your user settings. The only thing you have to be careful of is not to create an admin account on the clean install that's named the same as what's on your backup. You'll get a message about comflicting names. It's not that big a deal since you can rename the account and after the migration is done, you can clean it all up.

Thanks a lot. I wasn't sure if MA wouldn't ruin the "cleanliness" of the clean install. I'll give it a try.

By the way, I thought I had removed all PowerPC-only software but right now I still found some of it, marked by that special symbol. About a dozen of little programs. And just by appzappping them I have a feeling my machine has already speeded up...

Yes, I saw the progress bar. Ans the last time I waited it was a whole night... I did also restart from the Recovery partition and use disk repair, permissions repair. Is it different from "safety volume"? Then I'll try that one. But first I'll try it the normal way again, because I discovered a few old PowerPC apps that I had not seen after deleting all that old stuff after installing Lion. Maybe the issue is resolved already. I'll let you know.

Sorry, I meant the 'Recovery Partition' when i said safety volume. Sounds like you have covered everything. It should boot into the Safe Mode after running a repair from the recovery. Very strange if the repair reported it had no problems. I'd be getting close to cloning the drive with Carbon Copy Cloner as well as a TM and starting over with a format.

I had the same issue with the status bar "sticking". I also waited a whole evening (left work and returned the next morning). I think that's because I was trying to do a restore from the System drive of the computer. You can't do it that way, you have to boot from an external drive or USB drive on which LION is installed. Then your system drive becomes, in effect, just another hard drive. You can wipe it and do the clean install because you are booting from the external drive

Holey moley #2 - ARD is now working correctly. I had all kinds of issues with ARD under my LION upgrade. I'd get some computers showing up in Bonjour and some not - no rhyme or reason. Now it's working GREAT!

One more reason to do an Clean Install.

You are correct, I remember now you need to boot from another drive to run the repair.

OK, I'll try that.

By the way I could not start in safe mode when I tried now.

After removing every PowerPC app that I could find I made a restart and then used Clean My Mac to wipe everything that might be left. Finder is as fast as it used to be now. I'm very happy about that. Next thing I'll do is reboot from an external disk and do all the repairs from there. Let's see what happens then.

What's ARD? After repairing permissions from an external drive I got a message saying that the file in the screenshot had been changed and could not be repaired.