Ubuntu :: Laptop Runs Unbearably Slow When A Dock Is Running?

My friend recently gave up on Windows Vista on his old laptop and installed Ubuntu 10.10 64 Bit on it. He came over the other day because I wanted to show him and install some cool things. One of those things was a dock. I tried both AWN and Docky. When the dock started running his system became so unbearably slow. Like it took over 5 seconds to respond to movements sometimes. When he closed the dock everything went speedy again. He has a whole lot of compiz stuff running now, including desktop cube/animations burning up windows when he closes them. I'm wondering why the dock is causing such a major slow down.

His specs aren't even that bad. He has a Dell XPS M1330 with the following specs:Intel Core 2 Duo T6400 (2.0GHZ)4GB of RAMNVIDIA 8400M GSMy laptop has very similar specs to his, except my integrated graphics card is an ATI 3200 and it runs AWN and Docky flawlessly. Anyone have any ideas what could be causing this? His graphics card was one of those faulty NVidia cards from back then but he already had it fixed twice and its been running Vista without any graphic issues fine since. I didn't get a chance to look at it again since then so I couldn't play around.. I'm thinking he might have possibly messed something up playing around when he first installed it. I may suggest a clean install and do everything again to see if the problem persists.