Lion: tamed.

So.. my computer has been fought.. and conquered. TAKE THAT. I mean really, it's been an uphill battle. Not everyone has problems upgrading to Lion but me, I had all the problems. It took forever to install, it took forever to install programs, it took forever to use programs. Really, it was miserable. I followed like five different steps to fix the problems and finally (crossing fingers, knocking on wood) figured it out. So for one, I let Spotlight index the crap out of my computer.. and my hard drive.. and then turned it off in Terminal so I could backup my hard drive without Spotlight using 110% of my CPU... So then I verified the disk, repaired permissions, cleared my memory, cleaned up deleted files... Re-installed Lion (the fact that it only took 40 minutes instead of two hours was a good sign)... then reset the PRAM three times.

Then... magic... problem solved. My computer is a beast.
And I am SO relieved.