Your last suggestion re emptying the Recent Items hit the jackpot. I followed it, and now AppleWorks is lightning fast. I found about 1000 items in the Recent Items. That was it! Many thanks. (The other suggestions may have been correct, but the effects were not very noticeable.)
One thing that has plagued Appleworks is its inability to delete Recent items on its own. When it starts up it may have a very long list of aliases in that folder and it tries to find all the original files before the application loads completely. This can seriously slow down the opening of AW.
Go to the following folder and delete all it's contents. You will note that they are all aliases so you aren't deleting the actual files.
Users/you/Documents/Appleworks User Data/Starting Points/Recent Items
See if this helps.
I would also suggest going to Apple's site to download any updater you may not have for AW. Running the updater while booted in 9 will update the 9 version. Then boot to X and run it again and it will update the X version. There are actually two versions of AW and each will launch depending on what OS you are running. Note that while you are in 9 you may not see all the X parts as they aren't applicable to the 9 setup.
Sorry I can't get the link for you for the updater because my online service is giving me trouble and I can't get to the Apple site.
