Have I got an AT hangover?

[Joe Feely]

Hi,

Videos (e.g. 350MB avi file of 40 minutes playback) don't play properly,
goes out of sync, momentary stops (they play ok on laptop, so not
corrupted).
The problem seems to have started after I enabled some assistive
technology, which nearly paralysed the performance of the computer.
After disabling and deleting the assistive stuff (su -c "yum remove
at-spi*") the computer is still performing somewhat poorly, not being
able to do as much stuff as before and being generally much slower
(notably when opening multiple web pages, e.g. several weather reports,
about 10 tabs).

I assumed that there could be something that is still kicking in and
slowing the system down.

Sorry to be so vague, but I don't recall any better what I did.
I'm running Fedora 16, GNOME 3.2.1 is installed but I use XFCE, Kernel
Linux 3.4.11-1.fc16.i686.PAE, RAM 1.2GB, Processor Intel Celeron CPU
2.4GHz, Available disk space 84GB.
My computer is about 7 years old.

I could reinstall the system, and I'm confident that would remove this
problem, but I would much prefer to find the problem, and fix it.

I have looked at some top output, but don't notice anything relevant (if
anyone wants to see any of such, let me know what to do to get useful
output).

Any suggestions where I could start or what to look for would be welcome.

TIA,
Joe