Dehibilitating OSX 10.6.8 problems

I am a new user to this forum, but have for the past 2 years come here to troubleshoot whenever my macbook would take a dump on me. I am running osx 10.6.8 on 6gb ram on one of the "rare" late 2009 aluminum body macbook (non pro).

Since June I have been having problem after problem stemming from an update I had been putting off, Starting with a login loop that I fixed in safe mode. The problems that have been persistent since then is an overall decline in my macbook performance, boot-time, login time, initial startup, and normal running of my system (not heavy usage, just running mozilla with no other open programs in background) have all doubled or more in the time it takes to perform all of those tasks.

During this "light" use of my system, there will be random freezes of the system that can either be triggered by me left clicking on the dock, or just out of nowhere there will be a hang (with pinwheel) for anywhere from 30 sec to 5 mins. I try to fix permissions and everytime I fix them the same permissions need fixed there are a lot of them.

I have also since discovered that very few programs will run on my mac anymore: Itunes, Quicktime, VLC (occasionally), Symantec, iphoto. Those are just the ones I have tried so far. No error messages arise upon trying to open the programs just they will appear in dock (not bounce) with the light underneath them and the system will freeze, or nothing will happen and after that nothing or freeze the program disappears from the desktop.

I have less than half of my harddrive consumed so I know that is not the problem, I have been doing searches but most people with similar problems either get error messages or some other thing that I do not get or observe. Please any help with my problems would be greatly appreciated

G'day and welcome to the forums.

Paragraphs may make it a little easier on the eyes.

Have you booted from your install disc and run Repair Disk and then Repair Permissions from there? Sounds like you have a failing hard drive.

Haha, looking back now I can kick myself for not editing my post, I apologize. I have several weeks back used a leopard install cd to repair permissions and verify disk (couldnt find a snow leopard DVD) and same problem. I do have a disk image of snow leopard on a flash drive but I didn't know if that wpuld work or not.

I can easily open Mozilla, disk utility, and a few other programs but other won't open... Would a copy of the display from permissions repair help at all? I also checked consol when something would crash and it always said "bus error"

Update:
Just tried booting from install cd and holding down "c" at bootup, after the gray apple screen with the circling thing the computer goes totally black and the harddrive gets really quiet but is still running. Nothing happens then and I am forced to hold power to shut it off (takes longer than usual to shut off...).

Jackson0d said:

I am a new user to this forum, but have for the past 2 years come here to troubleshoot whenever my macbook would take a dump on me. I am running osx 10.6.8 on 6gb ram on one of the "rare" late...

Click to expand...

I am having this same problem with a macbook pro mid 2009 model. Ive tried using disk utility from the osx install disk and i get loads and loads "Open Error 5:" what seems for everything it is scanning. that status bar shows it will take an hour but it never moves and the time never increases nor decreases. at this point i cancelled the verify.

If i could id just get my pictures and docs of the computer and do a complete install writing all 0s over the drive..
would this make a difference, or is the drive in fact failing..?