[ale] X running excruciatingly slow

[John Wells]

Guys,

In the midst of a number of hardware changes I've been making at home, I
took a 40 gb drive that had been running as the slave on the primary ide
slot and switched it to master, and then dropped another 20gb drive in as
slave.

Before the switch, the 40gb drive had been running as slave to a 120gb
drive that I've moved to a different machine.

The 40gb has a Red Hat 8 install that ran perfectly fine two days ago, but
after the switch, X has become painfully slow, to the point that if I
don't drop to a virtual terminal right after gdm fires up, I am pretty
much unable to do anything.  The mouse pointer might move once every
thirty seconds or so, so it's as if it's running in super-duper slow mode.
 If I repeatedly tap ctl+alt+F(n) I can eventually get to a virtual
terminal, and then everything seems as fast as ever, no delay from key
strokes at all.

The gfx card is a geforce 2 with the proprietary NVIDIA drivers installed.

I'm at a loss on how to go about diagnosing this.  Has anyone seen similar
behavior in the past or do you have suggestions regarding what I should
examine?

Thanks for the help, as always!

John