GarageBand '09 Very Slow to Start

Question

GarageBand '09 is consistently taking over two minutes to start, from the time I double-click the app until the "Initializing..." window disappears and the main window appears. This didn't happen when I was running GarageBand '08.

Once it finishes initializing, it works fine.

While it is starting, other apps seems to freeze. Activity Monitor doesn't show high CPU usage or disk activity while GarageBand is initializing.

I am using GarageBand '09 v5.1 (398), running on a MacBook Pro with Mac OS X 10.5.8.

Googling shows some other people with similar problems, but they all refer to earlier versions of GarageBand.

I've tried deleting the GarageBand preference files, and have repaired permissions. No effect.

I see the same behavior when starting GarageBand from a different user account on the same machine.

Don't know if this is weird or not, but after GB starts, Activity Monitor reports that it uses ~25% CPU when it's just sitting there "doing nothing."

Any ideas?

Update:

Looking at the Console log, I see a message like this each time I try to start GarageBand:

8/11/09 10:11:53 PM kernel disk0s2: I/O error. 

Seems bad.

Answer 1

As noted in the question, my Console indicated an I/O error with the disk. I was afraid I'd need to replace the disk and re-install everything.

However, it turns out there was an easy workaround: I just made a copy of the GarageBand application, and trashed the original. The copy starts in a few seconds, as expected.