I've had Snow Leopard installed with a retail 10.6.1 DVD with Kakewalk for about 3 or 4 months. Soon after I updated to 10.6.3 and that's as far as I've gotten.

Just recently though, I've started experiencing many freezing issues most notably while using browsers, (Opera, Firefox, etc) or other apps (iTunes, Skype, Starcraft 1, Thunderbird) and many times the problem has started when I'm about to watch a video from YouTube, Vimeo, etc, but still can occur while randomly browsing. Once that happens, the browser becomes completely unresponsive and must do a Force Quit. After a reopen, the browser immediately becomes unresponsive again, and it stays in this cycle until I restart, and the problem randomly arises again.

Eventually this happens with pretty much every app I try to open or am using. Program freezes, I Force Quit, try to reopen and it either freezes on the Dock or it freezes right after it opens.

I've tried to examine Activity Monitor when this is happening and nothing seems to appear out of the ordinary from what I can tell? RAM is usually being used no more than half, CPU usage looks quite minimal.

It's very frustrating as when this happens, the whole computer is virtually unusable...

Here are my specs:

GA-EP35-DS3L

Q6600

9800GTX+

Installation is on a WD5000AAKX HDD

Also unrelated, is that I've unable to install any bootloader to independently boot without the Kakewalk CD in the drive. I've sort of left it alone because it didn't seem too inconvenient but it would definitely be nice to be able to boot without it.

Thanks in advance!