Finder folder contents slow to display (if at all)

Hello all,

Having a weird issue with my computer as of a few days ago. I've noticed that certain folders (generally sub folders) on my machine are very slow to show contents. To be clear: I'll navigate to a folder - lets say my downloads folder - and in there is a subfolder and when I try to open up that subfolder in the bottom corner a little pinwheel starts spinning and the contents of the folder are not displayed. Sometimes they eventually show up but sometimes even after a few minutes they never do. A simple reboot of the system makes things all good until after being on for a few hours the issues begin again.

For the visual learners:


As if that weren't enough even while attempting to make the screenshot for this I noticed that the images I was creating and saving to the desktop were not showing up on the desktop or in the finder when navigated to the desktop. The strange part: if I went back into pixelmator to try to save again they showed up in the save dialogue just fine...

I don't know if this is a Lion bug or an issue with my HDD (repaired permissions and the issues persist, verified the disk and there was no repair needed) but either way it's incredibly frustrating, and worrisome. Is my HDD about to crap out on me? Or is my computer just misbehaving?

Anyone who can offer any insight would be my hero!

 

I just discovered one thing: this ONLY happens in column mode. If I switch to list mode (which I prefer but Lion never seems to want to let me stick to) the problem goes away immediately.

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DRIVE FAILING! Crap. Guess I need to order a replacement ASAP.