bizarre problem

my ibookg4 suddenly is having quite a bizarre problem today. no problems till yesterday night.

1. i was running firefox and safari today along with ms-word and preview. the word file open was huge (~20mb, had lots of figures/pictures in it). and at some point during doing this, i wanted to save the word document that was open. and thats when for the first time, the 'spinning wheel' came on... subsequently, the computer become amazingly slow, like it would take 5 minutes to save the word document, displaying the " spinning wheel " all the while.

2. closing the word document and quitting word took like 8 minutes. i force quit all the program then.

3. finally, i rebooted the machine a couple of times and also did a filefault scan. i tried to go into the disk utility and tried to check for repair disks... but no avail.. the wheel keeps spinning...

any ideas what is the problem?

 

reinstalling OS

on a related note: does reinstalling the OS from a backup repair disk delete data that I already have on my hard drive.

 

thanks. Will do.