Appleworks Freezes

Question

Recently, when I've gone to save things in Appleworks they've spontaneously frozen (luckily for me, the screen stays open so I can take screenshots). When I try to force quit it I eventually managed to get the windows closed but the program remains open. I think this might be part of a bigger problem since it happened a couple times with TextEdit as well (TextEdit literally froze up while I was telling my friend that Appleworks froze up). Last time this happened, even shutting down the computer (the normal way) failed because it would not end. I ended up using the power button to turn my computer off (before re-doing much of my work). TextEdit also freezes when I try to save (though it happened a few times when I scrolled through the page).
On a possibly related note, my itunes occasionally decides to load extremely slow as I scroll through lists of songs or do anything. This at first made me think I had spread portions of information out too much over the hard-drive (or however that problem works) but since it didn't always run slowly and I hadn't added anything, I didn't think that made sense.
I'm running my anti-virus (norton) which usually takes all day but I'll post this anyway. I didn't think there were any actual viruses on Mac.

Answer 1

Norton has been on my computer long enough that I doubt it is the problem (though I've been told it doesn't do a good job). Apparently it no longer updates either because I have to renew it (I need to replace it). It has not changed at all in relation to the sudden change of all the things on my computer. It wasn't gradual, it was sudden. Now, all my applications randomly freeze up (generally when I switch or save or try to open something). Even my finder freezes occasionally (like right now). I did have a huge amount of things in my AW recent items list but most of them were no longer in existence. After briefly screwing up my AW by deleting only half of the aliases (they were in two locations or something) I fixed that. Unfortunately, it did not change anything (as I expected. AW had not changed and I did not experience a "slow-down" so much as a "catastrophic drop-off" in performance). My main hard drive has very little on it. I put almost anything I use on my external. My main hard drive has a small partition but it still has 3gb left. Again, I wouldn't think those things would make programs freeze completely, I would expect them to lag (which they don't).
I probably need to know what a 'good' anti-virus program that will clean both my Windows and my Mac (Norton scans them both from my Mac side) sides of the computer.
I think at some point I am going to need to reinstall pretty much everything to see if that works (though I'll have to check to see just how much reinstalling that requires).
I tried looking for the Disk Utility but my finder just froze.
The only thing I can think of that I downloaded recently was a newer (I think) shockwave player (mostly because my schoolwork recently uses it often and it lags a lot. Now it freezes for a minute or two before loading). I'd search it up and delete it but my finder is frozen and I'd probably just have to download it again.
At the moment my Finder, ProVoc, and TextEdit programs are frozen so I need to restart. Add AppleWorks to that list. I was going to save this post and repost it after I restarted but I guess I can't now.