Mountain Lion killing my system!!

Ever since I upgraded to Mountain Lion a few months ago shortly after it came out, my system is still running really poorly... I've hoped to give it time to settle down, for updates, and so on, but everything works very slow, transistions poorly, and it seems to hate my Adobe CS 5.5.

It's especially bad when I swtich from one application to another, such as InDesign to Illustrator, or from CS to Safari, or just try to close a program ofter using it for a while. Safari freezes constantly, which is something I had never experienced before with OS 10.7. Processes run slow on a regular basis in all the CS programs, and Pages or Numbers, and I get the rainbow wheel all the time in just about every program, and sometimes I get the little blue wheel with 4 quadrants. Closing Adobe CS programs has become something I've had to do when I'm not using them, in the hopes to free up RAM or processes or whatever for others, but they usually crash or just don't close when I do that. I never had to do that before 10.8.

I don't want to exaggerate which might impede anyone steering me in the right direction, but it really is as bad as I am trying to succinctly illustrate. Beyond this, my fan seems to ALWAYS be running - honestly about 75% of the time, and it always feels like it is running hot. I have to say, this is the worst experience with a new OS since OS 10 first came out around 11 or so years ago, or whatever it was. 10.7 always worked very well for me, especially with CS and other programs - I've never been at such a loss as to how to fix an OS issue.

Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!

Dustin

I have 4GB of RAM, and the early 2011 MacBook Pro (bought in July of 2011) with a 2.2 Intel i7. 21" LG LED monitor as the main display, running the laptop as the second window.