Macbook Pro is acting up repeatedly

[pintsallround]

I purchased my mbp last January, and lately (past 2 weeks) it's been going through random "heart attacks?". I'll be on Adium, Firefox, iTunes, etc. when all of a sudden everything will close and an error message will pop up for each program saying "Firefox/iTunes/Adium has encountered an error, would you like to close, reopen, etc." ALSO, my dock and upper menu (Finder?) thing will both start blinking (disappearing and then reappearing, over and over again) along with my Mac HD folder, which also does the repeated disappearing act. After this happens, I can no longer open any other programs, because it just elicits more error messages. The only way I've found to stop this madness is to reset or turn off the computer. Anyone else come across this problem, or find a solution? Thanks