Several software programs continually crash

Question

Ever since I upgrade to Leopard I have notice a slowing down of my system. Today several programs kept crashing over and over and all I could do was reboot, Then they would still crash.
The programs were DiscLabel from Smile on my mac. It would freeze up so I'd go to Force Quite and see that it was not responding. I'd force quit it and "closed unexpectedly": window would come up. But the Disc Label not responding would remain in Force Quit and would not disappear even after repeated attempts to force quit it.
I'd burn a DVD through Toast 9 and the disc would mount but the DVD Player would launch but not run. In force quite the same thing as Disc Label would happen exactly as noted above.
I was running Safari and opening a pdf and it crash yet Safari was still ini the Force Quit window "not responding" and it would not disappear.
In all cases I could not relaunch any crashed program. Additionally, I would send the reports to Apple, but they would not go through, although I have internet connection and have been using Mail all day.
Finally, I have 6TB raid array with two separate Raids 1 and 2. Today, for the first time Raid 1 is not coming up on my Desktop. All drives seem to be running fine (of course I know that is not a sure thing and a bad drive could be the problem) but it ran fine yesterday and with the problems all around my system today, I am wondering if Leopard could be the issue on that as well.
Thanks for any pointers or help if getting through this/these problems.
Doug

Answer 1

Create a new account, name it "test" and see how your apps work in that User acct? (That will tell if your problem is systemwide or limited to your User acct.) This account is just for test, do nothing further with it.
Open System Preferences >> Accounts >> "+" make it an admin account.
If the problem is present in the test account also, then it is systemwide. In this case try repairing this with the 10.5.5 Combo Update This is a fuller install, as opposed to an incremental "delta" update so it should overwrite any files that are damaged or missing. It does not matter if you have applied it before.
Remember to Verify Disk before update and repair permissions after update from /Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.
If the problem does not appear in the test account try starting in "Safe Mode" (It will take a bit more time to startup because it runs a directory check first).
If that works go to System Preferences >> Accounts >> Login Items and remove them. Boot normally and test. If there are still problems, go to ~(yourHome)/Library/Contextual Menu Items and move whatever is there to the desktop. Then do the same with /Library/Contextual Menu Items. Lastly, try moving /Users/Home)/Library/Fonts to your desktop and restarting.
Log out/in or restart, if that sorts it start putting items back one at a time until you find the culprit.
Let us know.
-mj