Please help (beachball, hard drive mount point issue?)

[McPaul]

Please help (I'll be quick):

• recently significant beachballs
• safari and firefox
• force quit only option to remedy
• restart computer works but after several minutes problem persists
• I'm not sure how to run activity monitor, have set it to show all processes and update very frequently, but nothing ever shows up on the processes window.
• ran disk utility a few times, doesn't help. verify disk: everything looks fine, repair permissions returns "Warning: SUID file "System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/Resources/OwnerGroupTool" has been modified and will not be repaired.
  " but doesn't fix them, as these errors appear again next time I repair permissions. (actually, this time when I ran disk utility to get a copy of the error messages, only one error appeared. previously, I received 3 errors. )
• I have noticed something weird, in that the hard drive mount point is not mounted to a specific point any longer. I don't know what the default was, but the mount point in disk utility is simply "/" and the mount button is greyed out. computer is just more than a year old, no apple care. last years 15" tricked out MBP.

Anyone have any suggestions please?

thanks.

 

[McPaul]

Here are all the errors that wont be fixed when doing repair permissions:

Warning: SUID file "System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/Resources/OwnerGroupTool" has been modified and will not be repaired.

Group differs on "private/etc/cups", should be 0, group is 26.

Permissions differ on "private/var/spool/cups/cache/rss", should be drwxr-xr-x , they are drwxrwxr-x .


How might I rectify this? it's all greek to me. Thanks!