[mikefreeman]

Ok. I feel kinda dumb now. As it turns out, there was a process running in the background that was using 100% CPU, which bogged down everything on the system. It was something I had forgotten I'd set up as a cron task. It was running as root, so it didn't show up in my system monitor because it was set to the default of just showing my user processes. The program froze up for some reason, so I got rid of it and all is now running smooth. I should have check on my root processes first thing. Oh well.