Did a disk fix from the recovery console; there were some issues on the drive, and performance seems somewhat better. SMART is fine. Looking at CPU, RAM and disk usage, they're all absolutely fine. The memory is running well below 4GB, and it's not being paged to disk. Maybe an OS reload is called for.
The interesting thing is that Mail is perfect, Safari is OK, and Word 2008 is an absolute dog.
The interesting thing is that Mail is perfect, Safari is OK, and Word 2008 is an absolute dog.