Yet another Mac Book Pro (A1211/2.33 GHz) freeze problem

Hi everyone,
I have yet another freeze mystery, if people fancy having a crack at it.
I had this notebook for about 4 and a half years and it served me well until 2 months ago. It is a 15' MBP from December 2008 (A1211) with a 2.33GHz Core 2 Duo and 2GB of RAM.
Now I constantly get lags or freezes while I am using it.It manifests itself via the beachball and a frozen screen. First, I thought it was the hard drive but I replaced it with a tested new one and I still get the same behaviour. The reason I thought it was the HD is that it seems to freeze often when there was a lot of access to HD or memory. For example, firefox would cause a freeze quite often when it was trying to access the cache or history. I get the same behaviour when trying indexing my music for the genius feature. Often when I close applications, it will halt the system for about 2 minutes.
I think the number of lags also correlates with temperature. I am pretty sure that the notebook's heat diffusion properties has deteriorated strongly over the past year as it seems to be using the fans a lot more extensively. The heatsink seems to get really hot these days as well. So my next step would be checking the thermal paste on the heat sink. Before I am going to do that, I want to consider any remaining options as dismantling the laptop up to the heatsink is a bit of a pain.
My gut feeling would be that it has to do either with the memory or maybe some 'bridge' that transfers the data between HD, GPU, CPU and memory. I am aware that bridge is the wrong word and I am simplifying the architecture of the mainboard too much, but I am sure you get what I mean. The data rate between some of those is inhibited.
The reason why I am saying some is that often the system seems overwhelmed by the amount of commands, just sits there and then resumes executing all of them as it had taken a break. This can be easily seen when streaming video in a web browser. I often get the beach ball and my whole screen freezes, but the movie, or at least the sound, keeps running in the background. After a while it usually resumes and shows the movie at the current playing position. Sometimes it doesn't recover, not even after 30 minutes and I have to switch it off.
I hope I provided enough information for you guys to have a think about this.
Any help in this matter would be gratefully appreciated.

Before re-installing the operating system, which might also work, I found this article helpful:
http://macs.about.com/od/usingyourmac/qt/Fix-Spod-How-To-Fix-A-Spinning-Pinwheel -Of-Death.htm
I've followed the directions since they seem to make sense and am waiting for the next Pinwheel of Death. They seem to be saying the same thing you are Chris, but ascribe the problem to 'permissions' which are fixable (gasp) via the OS disc utility.

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