Why does revolving gear wheel suddenly appear

After I have been working on my iMac for a while (an hour or so), the revolving gear wheel suddenly appears exactly where it does upon startup, and I am dead in the water. No keyboard or mouse entries work. My only choice is to completely shut down the computer and start it up again. Nothing seems to be prompting the appearance of the gear wheel. When it appears, I might have one or two programs open, or as many as half a dozen. Again, this is the gear wheel, not the colored pinwheel. Has anyone else encountered this problem?

Unusual behaviour in terms of when the centre spinning gear appears.  Suspect you may have a problem on your internal disk. 
Ensure you have a complete backup of your internal drive if possible.
It may help to restart in “Safe” mode.  Restart but quickly hold down the Shift key as you boot.  After you successfully boot in Safe mode, the restart again but this time just a normal boot without holding down any keys.  When you are in Safe mode not all features on your machine will function, not to worry about that; just boot in safe and then reboot normally.
If this doesn’t work, you could use Disk Utility to examine and repair the internal disk if needed.  Start the computer from your Install DVD by holding down the ‘C’ key with the Install DVD inserted in the optical drive.  But don’t do an actual install.  Enter your language preference and then when the first install panel shows up, go to the Tools menu in the menu bar and select Disk Utility.  Click on your Macintosh HD entry and do Verify Disk Permissions and Repair Disk Permissions.  You should repeat Repair Disk Permissions a couple of times.  There will be some things found that shouldn’t be any problem, but you’ll note possibly several permissions that are repaired.
You can also run Verify Disk and Repair Disk as well which may correct some broken files or directories that may be the problem.

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