Re-installing Snow Leopard - Slow and Stalling

I've been having this problem for over a week. Initially, my MacBook was working fine. My kids were watching a DVD and all of the sudden the, "You need to hold down the power button" screen came up and I restarted the computer.
Ever since then, the MacBook would run well for 10-15 seconds and then stall (beach ball spinning) for 2-3 minutes, sometimes longer. I tried several tools including TechTool Pro, Maintenance, and repairing permissions but nothing helped. Eventually, I partitioned the disc and re-installed Snow Leaopard and it seemed to work fine for a day.
But when I woke up this morning, the beach ball was back and it continued to stall. Since I wasn't too far from having just re-installed the OS, I tried it again. This time, I can tell the stalling is affecting the installation. It's been two hours since I began the installation, but it is not even halfway through the process.
Could there be an issue with the hard disk that has caused this and is there a solution at all?

The hard drive is 250 gb, but there is around 150 gb left on it. And no, it's not the original installation disk. Unfortunately I'm out of the country and the originals are 15,000 miles away.
Still, that wouldn't explain why the initial hanging happened, or why it worked well for a while and then had problems again. Right?

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