Why is my Motion 5 running so sloooooooow

I am new to Motion and after installing it and beginning to play around a bit I am surprised at how often it locks up and the beach bal spins and spins and spins often resulting in the program "Not Responding". This is happening without a file even being open. I am running a 2009 Mac Pro (2 x 2.26 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon) with 24GB RAM and a ATI Radeon HD 4870 512 MB graphics card. Shouldn't this handle Motion with ease? What am I missing?