MacBook (White) is freezing needing manual restart, Office 08 related?

Question

Please forgive me if this is in the wrong thread, this is my first time posting; I really couldn't figure out where this should go; I won't be offended if it gets moved.
For quite some time now, about a year and a half, every so often my computer would suddenly start to bog down, show the beach ball, one by one things would stop working such as the app dock, corners, etc., then mouse stops responding and eventually results in needing to be manually restarted. This whole process from start to finish takes about 30-60 seconds. I never once have received a crash report or any sort of clue as to what causes this problem. It would seem to happen rather randomly, but infrequently enough to not really be a true nuisance.
However, in September I switched from 10.5 to 10.6 and am updated to 10.6.4. At the same time, I started to heavily need to use this computer to type college papers and I constantly am using Office 2008. Around the time I switched to SL, this problem has increased to seemingly every two hours or so. It is causing major problems as I am losing large portions of work. I can give you what I have learned and what I have tried, but I cannot seem to find any sort of solution:
1. Possibly a corruption with a font - I opened fontbook, verified and cleaned up all duplicates and a few with critical errors, rebooted and reset the PRAM. No change.
2. Possibly a compatibility issue between Office 2008 and SL - I reinstalled Office 2008, updated everything, cleared the msword plist, reset PRAM, and still no alleviation.
Also, before SL, it seemed to be utterly random; now it does seem to coincide with the use of at least MS Word, and especially when I try to copy/paste or drag and drop something, and possibly when autosave is triggered but there is still no set pattern. I have found various tidbits of information online that lead me to believe that it might have something to do with something Office uses referred to as a Temporary Scratch File used to hold copied text, when drag-and-dropping, etc. and that it may be reaching a size limit that causes a fatal crash. Also, just before it crashed this last time, just before it completely froze, a window popped up from Word that read
"Word encountered an error reading JM2010Bus.tmp (name of file that was being used). The file may be corrupt."
I understand myself that this is pointing to the autosave file that Word uses, but it is not specific to just this file. It will happen seemingly at random regardless of the file being used and regardless of content or size.
Unfortunately (and maddeningly), I do not have any sort of error report or crash status that comes up after a restart, at least not automatically. Perhaps if there is a way to look at some sort of activity log leading up to a crash, I might be able to give you some more info about this problem, but I can't find anything myself. About the only facts I can give you are that it seems to occur mostly when Word is in use, and tends to be related to using copy/paste and/or autosave. The computer itself is a 2.1 GHz Intel Core Duo with 2Gb RAM and 320 GB HD. Office and OSX10.6.4 are all updated to the most recent available. This problem has persisted after switching from OSX 10.5 to 10.6, and has persisted past swapping in a new HD. Also, I own a black MacBook and a Mac Pro, both of which run Office 2008 and SL, and have never once encountered this problem. I can say for sure that it is software related and not hardware; this problem originally occurred in my black MacBook, but after I swapped drives from black and white, it only now happens in the white and the black is fine.
Please send me off in the right direction; I have to say that I am totally lost with this problem. I can't seem to find anything on this specifically or what to do about it after hours of searching on this forum and in google. I'm pulling my hair out!

Answer 1

How much free space is on the hard drive? Boot from your OS installer disk (10.6.x) and run Repair Disk from Disk Utility.