How much does Hardware Growler affect performance? I'm interested in knowing how much Hardware Growler affects performance.

My MacBook's performance at some of point in time became terrible and I could not figure out the reason. The Beachball of Death was spinning most of the time and I was thinking of getting a new machine because the current one was almost unusable.

I thought that the problem was related to hardware as the Activity Monitor was not showing any intensive CPU usage. Finally, I had a brainwave and removed Hardware Growler and all my performance problems went away. 

I'm wondering if anyone else has had this problem or would be helped by this observation.

If anyone knows the exact reason why this would be that would be a bonus.
Seems like I just had the same effect on Mountain Lion. The computer was so slow that I started to prepare for a reinstall of ML. The machine just hung for minutes just as described here. When I disabled Hardware Growler (newest version from the Mac App Store), performance went up again as if it were a fresh installation!
I will keep an eye on this...