So, I'd been having trouble with my laptop for a few months, but in these last few weeks it had gotten really bad. Where before I'd only have the occasional stall and necessary force quit, it got to the point where even doing the slightest thing would send my machine pinwheeling away. So I hesitantly backed up as much as I could, nervously trying not to upset whatever mojo was working in my favor at the moment, and then I wiped the hard drive. I did a reinstall from my OS disk, and began to slowly move things back into their proper places.
For a few days it seemed like the hard drive wipe may have done the trick. Then, the problems emerged