Are they the only apps that freeze when that happens? or does the whole system freeze? if you open activity monitor, are any processes taking over the system? have you installed any plug-ins to both lately? is it a specific page that does it all the time?
Which version of OSX are you running? which version of the apps are you running?
The more info the better
Edit: Repair permissions might be a good idea when you suspect that some application during installation messed up permissions, but it is not recommended to do all the time just to see if it fixes something. May I recommend a disk verification in case a file is corrupted instead.