Why can't I download PDF files, and why does the "spinning beach ball" keep showing up?

I have a late 2008 iMac, 3.06 GHz Core 2 Duo, 4 GB 800 MHz DDR2 SDRAM, 500 Gig Hardrive, and I'm using OS X 10.6.8.  In addition, there are three external drives - 750 G Maxtor, 1T Maxtor, and 1T LaCie for Time Machine.  There are only 20 Gigs left of space on the internal hard drive.   The two problems I continue to have are that PDF files are not visible when I click on the download link, and I keep seeing the "spinning beach ball" when I'm trying to work with photos in iPhoto '09 or Lightroom 4.1.  Sometimes it seems like the system is waiting for the 750 G external drive to activate before the beach ball disappears.  Can anyone tell me what's going on?

There are only 20 Gigs left of space on the internal hard drive.
That'll slow you down a bit.
See if disconnecting the LaCie helps.
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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