IMac kind of freezes

Hi,
This is my first Mac and I feel lost when problems arise as I have no knowledge of the Mac operating system.
My problem is that recently, all of a sudden, in different situations, my program stops working as I cannot do anything I attempt to do. Sometimes, if I have attempted to copy some text, it will stick to the cursor like, if I'm moving it and will not unstick. If I try Cmd+Option Esc, the box comes up, but it won't Quit. Photos have also "stuck" to my cursor.
I thought maybe it was the three external drives I have connected, so I only left the one with Time Machine. The others are disconnected.
Well, just now it happened again. I am going to recreate exactly what happened as I wrote it down as it was happening.
I was working in Adobe Lightroom 3. I had chosen some photos to upload to Flickr. I then started choosing from this selection by holding the Command key. After I selected a few, it froze again. Clicking in the next photo would not select it or do nothing.
I thought then maybe it was Time Machine, so I unplugged it. I got the notification that it had not been ejected properly and clicking on OK would do nothing. It then disappeared.
I tried to select another photo again and nothing.
I could not get out of that window or quit the program, so I pressed the power button to put my Mac to sleep. I then pressed the toolbar and all is well.
Other times that this has happened, putting it to sleep has solved the problem.
What could be happening? I was told by all my Mac friends that this would not happen on a Mac!
I would really appreciate your help. I guess I will learn something on the way.
Thank you,
Gloria

If nothing goes wrong agian, then it finally was the tablet driver!! At least I discovered errors on my hd on the way.
Iyacyas, yes I have backup. I have Time Machine running alone backing up my Mac hard drive. I then have two more hard drives with all my photos up to 2009 (one hd is backing up the other). I had not updated my 2010 photos, so now they are safely on an external too.
So these kinds of errors on the hard drive are considered normal? ( Invalid Volume File Count)
Glad you are back up and running and things are starting to go smoothly. It sounds like you have a pretty good backup plan and I'm glad you had the foresight to do that.
Every HD no matter what OS is loaded on it will from time to time have issues. One of the nice things about OS X is it will do daily, weekly and monthly maintenance in the middle of the night to take care of most things. If you happen to turn off your machine nightly it will perform the routines on startup, they're done in the background so you're normally just not aware. If you want to download a widget called Maintidget it will allow you to manually run these AND also keep track of when they ran last.

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