Q: Disk Utilities, ITunes, beachball on every browser

There's no reason to repair permissions. You can ignore those iTunes ones, DU can't fix them, even though it reports that it did. If your browsers are experiencing hangs (SBBODs), then check out http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/sbbod.html

Then, I suspect something else is going on that's mucking up the permissions. Next step, after reviewing the FAQ, is to log into a newly created admin user account and see if the problem persists.