Late 2010 iMac Running Sluggish and Loud-PLS HELP

I have only found one or two threads relating to my specific problem, and I still need more help. Anyone's help (...Linc Davis) would be very much appreciated.
First off, let me tell you what I am running.
Late 2010 model iMac (3.2 GHz intel core). OSX Snow Lion 10.6.8. 4GB Ram.  1TB hard drive (less than half full)
Here is where I have isolated the problem so far.
-Switching between applications is often very sluggish and laggy. It takes up to 10 seconds sometimes to open an appplication.
-Playing audio files with either itunes or preview. Quite often a song will stall for up to 5 or more seconds before playing again
                    -NOTE occasionally the audio actually cut out for five seconds and then start again later on in the song as opposed to simply stalling.
-Typing in search bars, this action is often sluggish and laggy as well.
-Clicking on icons and links. Example, at the start up window when I clicked on my user account it took about three seconds to bring up the username box
-Fan is working very loudly right from startup, and not slowing down at all.
Here are the solutions I have tried to no avail.
-Ran disk utility, everything came up as ok
-monitered my CPU usage with various problem causing applications. The RAM usage is fine and should be working great, I almost always have more than half freed up RAM
-I replaced the thermal cream around the hard drive because it was over heating a bunch and I also gave it a good clean. This fixed the over heating problem but the laggin still occurs.
-SMC reset (twice). no change.
I don't know what to do next, somebody please help. Do I have any malware? Is my harddrive failing?
p.s. I'm pretty noob to the intricacies of going deep into computers, but I can follow steps and figure out what's going on easy enough.

Hello, see how many of these you can answer...
See if the Disk is issuing any S.M.A.R.T errors in Disk Utility...
http://support.apple.com/kb/PH7029
Open Activity Monitor in Applications>Utilities, select All Processes & sort on CPU%, any indications there?
How much RAM & free space do you have also, click on the Memory & Disk Usage Tabs.
Open Console in Utilities & see if there are any clues or repeating messages when this happens.
In the Memory tab, are there a lot of Pageouts?

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