Can't empty trash can and constant beach ball

[Neous]

I've been experiencing some not too pleasant moment with my macbook pro.
I've been getting the spinning beach ball very frequently,
Symptoms: unable to move files from one folder to another, unable to empty out my trash can, I now expect Firefox to take a good minute before it launches, I expect to be frozen for a moment when switching spaces,
Time machine keeps failing (last back up was on 10/18/10) but I do most of my work on the imac so I’m not loosing much except for Virtual Machines I stored on my Desktop

I've done some research which led me to
repair my disk permission
repair the disk through Disc Utility and fsck.

Well unfortunately for me nothing seems to be working, I started another back with a different external hard drive hopefully this goes through so I can just blast my hd. In the meantime if you have any suggestions I’ll be glad to hear it.

thanks

 

[jman240]

Boot off a Mac OSX install DVD and run disk utility from the setup environment and check the disk out. You can also repair perms this way.

You can force the trash can to empty (if you think its related) by using terminal and the rm command. The trash is usually at ~/.Trashes so I would

cd ~/.Trashes
ls
rm [filename]

the ls will list the contents of the hidden folder .Trashes (may be just .Trash) and then the rm (remove) command will remove the files from your disk. This is not undo-able so use caution.

 

[RaceTripper]

Open up the Console app and search for "I/O error"

If they show up, your disk is going bad and should be replaced. The symptoms you describe certainly point to that as a possibility.