Sudden Frequent Freezing

Hi,
My Macbook is a few years old and used constantly and has been glitchy for a while, but has been functional. it freezes a fair amount, but usually only for a short time, and when I restart, it works fine for a least a day (i tend to leave it on with a lot of tabs open which causes issues, but i can always easily fix them with a restart).
A few days ago, it became virtually non-usable. Itunes and Adium work fine, but when I restart it and try to logon to wireless, it starts generally giving the spinning wheel and freezing. Firefox is non-usable. It will work ok for about a minute, but can't even handle one tab. When I try to scroll, switch tabs, or close one, it freezes and does the spinning wheel for solid minutes at a time. It happens so frequently I really can't use it. Sometimes it just won't stop and I've had to restart almost a dozen times in one day by holding down the power button since it is frozen.
This happened for seemingly no reason,and now restarting is making no difference because it happens again as soon as I open Firefox, although it does not seem to be exclusive to Firefox. Restarting has always made it work fine, and now is having no effect. I'm not sure what's going on.
Any ideas? Thanks so much for reading...it's driving me crazy.
Ignore typos -I'm on a netbook so I can do this and the keyboard is tiny.
Message was edited by: Julie Ellard

Hi Julie,
since a couple of days ago, I have a very similar problem.
The Macbook works fine for a time (can be half an hour), but after that, frequent freezes occur. The spinning wheel will turn up and the Macbook will be unusable for a minute or so. This happens more and more often until the Macbook becoems unusable.
Shutting down and rebooting does not solve the problem with me. Shutting down and waiting does. Sound like a temperature problem? Istat does not report anything unusual (ca. 40° CPU temp) - very strange.
I already tried to reset the SMC (btw - how do I know that I succeeded?)
I am using Snow Leopard having installed all the latest updates (10.6.6).
So If anybody has any ideas what else to try, give us a hint.
Christian

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