IMac getting slower and apps keep crashing

Question

Hi there!
In Feb. last Year (2011) i bought my iMac 27'' and i was pretty satisfied with that. But in the last few months, I encountered A LOT of problems. I will list them afterwards. But before you start giving me some advice you have to know that I used Google a houndred times for each single problem, and none of the solutions that were given helped me out (mostly "delete file XYZ in "cache" tips"), so here is the list and I really hope to get some help!
-Textedit freezes after opening
-Quicktime Player X freezes after opening
-Safari does not remember my passwords even though i checkedthe "remember password" box
-In Safari, youtube videos do not start loading if I watch in a lower quality than 720p
-the "Steam"-App launches on startup, even though I deleted it from the startup elements AND unchecked the "open on startup" in the Steam-preferences
-Since the installation of Bootcamp (Windows 7) my iMac starts up really slow (from 10 seconds (before) up to 2 Minutes!)
-the iCal app tells me that I don't have permission to access it
I got a 1TB harddisk, of which 200 GB are for Windows 7, and for the rest, onlye 300/800 GB are used, so it can't be a memory problem.
I'm running Mac OS X Lion 10.7.3 with an 3.6Ghz i5 Processor and 8GB 1333MHz DDR3 Memory... the Startup Disk is of course Macintosh HD.
Hoping for Help!
thank you

Answer 1

Maybe try this.  Restart your computer in recovery mode (when you hear the chime, press and hold the option key until you are presented with boot options, pick the one that says recovery).   From there, open disk utility and select your Macintosh HD, do a disk repair followed by a permissions repair. Now you should have a known good file structure.  Reboot and see if things improve, from what you've described I think there are other issues but it is always good to start with a known file structure.
Many of the issues you describe sound like user level permission problems.  To fix these you need to reset the ACLs (access control list).  It also sounds like you need to flush your caches.  A program like Onyx or Cocktail will do these things for you.  Onyx is free, do some research on it so you know how to use it.
Finally, my son uses steam and I think it is a flakey program at best.  Look at users/groups in system preferences and then see what starts automatically? steam likes to put something there.  Also check your system for updates including updates for flash.
Your machine should be ripping right along, it just sounds like it got gummed up.