Applications Crashing, Internet Only Working At Dial Up Speeds

I am having extremely painful problems with my imac G6 20" that is coming up 2 years old in march 2010..

Up until now it has run like a dream never crashing, freezing or quiting applications for no reason..

about a month ago i moved house and didnt have internet for a month i set it up once we had moved and everything seemed to be fine.. i packed away again, as i didnt need it without the internet and once the internet was put through i set it back up ready to use..

as soon as the internet was put through i stated noticing problems.. firstly even though the internet we had bought after the move was up to 4x faster than the old broadband its was running as slow as dial up on my mac..

so i test it out on my sister £300 dell laptop which is slow at the best of times, and the internet was running at super speeds.

so i go about the process of deleting all the cookies and tempory internet files on my mac in the hope of some speed increase.. no luck..

so i struggle with epically slow internet for about 2 weeks and then more problems start hitting, at first i would get firefox freeze and i had to force quit it.. occasionally it happens but not 4/5 times in an hour..

then yesterday the entire OS failed and i had a box telling me to hold down the power button until my mac turned off..

and now its freezing applications all the time and still so slow..

i have never had this problem before and is hoping there is something i can do other than totally wiping it..

ANY advice would be much appreciated

If I were you the first thing I'd do is get another computer in there to test the Internet connection. If the other computer runs fine online, then you've isolated the problem to your machine.

Incidentally, I started having problems similar to what you describe while using Firefox. I assumed it was just something buggy in the latest (at that time) Firefox update. So it prompted me to switch to Safari. Safari ran great for me from day one. So, you might want to close Firefox, bring up Safari, and see if that makes a difference.

I use 3 internet browsers on a regular basis and i'm having similar problems on all 3 Safari, Firefox & Camino... the whole machine doesn't run like it used to. It started on Browsing and now all tasks seem slower and less responsive

the wireless signal is at full strength and the laptop has no problem running on it..

+ the constant application failing is not right..

So it sounds like the problem really is specific to your machine rather than the router or internet connection.

Try this:

Try deleting the following files from the ~/Library/Preferences/ directory (this is the Library directory within your User folder):
com.apple.internetconfig.plist
com.apple.internetconfigpriv.plist
com.apple.internetconnect.plist

Does the whole computer seem slow? Booting slow? That screen you got is a Kernel Panic. Could be the hard drive dying.

Do you have the OSX DVD's that came with your Mac? If so, put in DVD #1 and hold down the D key after the startup sound and load the Apple Hardware Test. Run the extended test and see if anything shows up.

thanks!! i will try this and yeah.. its seems both of those things!.. ill try what you said and see what comes back thanks again!

ive run the extensive 1 hour test and it said everything was fine, Gah i have no answer or cure to the problem!