I see the beach ball often on my iMac G5 with 512MB RAM. Hate it.
As you said: “I don’t care too much for the technical reasons, I just don’t want to see that damn thing!”
Agree with Spartacus. Just drag and drop the application folder to the dock and you have the "start" menu. You just need to click and hold for a while for the "menu" to appear OR right click if you have 2-button mouse OR ctrl+ (left)click to have the "menu" appear immediately. By this way, you can access to all the applications you have in your application folder. Same thing can be done with any other folder, even the hardisk drive.
I used this for a while when I first switched to OSX, but eventually stopped. why? Just keep the icon for the applications you use most often on the dock and you can launch the application with just one click!
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