Programs freezing/Not responding... Please help.

Lately my mac has started acting very strangely. I've tried to troubleshoot it on my own, and I'm all out of ideas. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

First of all, the hardware info:


The only thing I have done recently out of the ordinary, was unplug a USB hub with multiple devices (hard drive, flash card reader) by accident without mounting them. I am in the middle of a move, and when I got got my computer to my new apartment, I noticed it immediately acting very funny. Extremely sluggish, and programs were freezing.

--I went to disk utility, and verified permissions. There were a few things listed, and I then repaired disk permissions.

--That didn't fix anything so I opened up Onyx and performed every maintenance/cleaning task available to execute. Still, no fix.

--After that, I booted from the install disk, and repaired permissions from the install disk utility, and still to no avail.

Things seem to be a tad better, but programs keep freezing. Mail, Safari, Firefox, System Settings, etc. I'll have the program open, and it's running fine, and then all of the sudden, the color wheel starts spinning, and the program is unresponsive. My dock is still responsive, and I can click on other windows/open other programs, but I have to force quit the frozen programs. It force quits successfully, and I can then relaunch the program, but the frequency of this issue is maddening. It's happening every 15 minutes or so, depending on what I'm doing. Clicking links in mail, loading certain pages in safari, and clicking a category in system settings can all trigger it, and it is intermittent. Restarting my computer is also VERY slow, taking about 3-4 minutes to complete. Also, my computer is somewhat unresponsive when I try to wake it from sleep mode. I can hear the hard drive spinning, and it is still powering usb devices, but the screen is black. I can press keys/move the mouse all day long and it wont wake up and I am forced to hold the power button down and restart it. I checked to see if any particular program was going crazy and hogging memory, and nothing seemed to out of the ordinary. Here is what my activity monitor looks like:



Thank you in advance for any help you may have to offer. If there are any additional screenshots/info I can give you to better assist me, please let me know and I will get it to you asap. I tried to give as much information as possible. Do you think my hard drive could be failing? I'm all out of ideas on this one...

Best,
Jon

 

figured it out...

well, after a few days of head scratching and trouble shooting, I managed to figure out the problem on my own. I wanted to come back and post the solution so anyone else who happens to have the same problem may be able to solve it without going through the same frustration that I did. Apparently when I moved, and I unplugged my USB hub, something got messed up with my peripherals. Last night I put my computer in to target mode to back up the whole hard drive with the intent on re-installing a fresh copy of OSX this morning. I unplugged everything from the back except a firewire cable. Low and behold, when I turned it back on this morning to begin the re-install, everything was suddenly working fine... I tried plugging the USB hub in again and boom, programs started freezing. I ended up resetting my PRAM, and now everything is working fine with the USB hub plugged in. I did a little searching, and I think it may have something to do with my core audio driver and my MBox audio interface that I use for recording. Either way, problem is solved, and I hope this can help some else somewhere on down the road.