I had a LOT of fun repairing my old Pismos with broken ones bought on Ebay. Are any Macbooks like that? Are some...

Use Firefox. I have the same problem, Safari just gives the beachball of death. I've tried everything, including a reinstall of Snow Leopard and a reinstall of Safari (and cache clearing and pram clearing and repairing permissions, etc etc etc.) Everything else works fine. Took to an Apple Store. Eventually they diagnosed a failing hard drive. I replaced it and all is well.