Programs freezing up on my MacPro

Ok so starting about 2 weeks ago my programs
-Final Cut 2
-Yahoo IM
-Firefox
and now Safari

will freeze up. Pinwheel of doom so to say, and so I force quit the program and well...the program seems to quit but there is still the little blue dot below the icon in my dashboard. The program never fully closes and it starts seeming like a domino effect where then the next program freezes up.

The only way I can get the program started back up is by doing a hard reset (holding in the power button til it turns off and turning it back on) because it will also not let me reset.

I feel it may have something to do with videos but I am not 100% sure on that.

I hope you can help.

Thanks,
C

here is my comp stats if that may help
Model Name: Mac Pro
Model Identifier: MacPro3,1
Processor Name: Quad-Core Intel Xeon
Processor Speed: 2.8 GHz
Number Of Processors: 2
Total Number Of Cores: 8
L2 Cache (per processor): 12 MB
Memory: 2 GB
Bus Speed: 1.6 GHz