Making this post for future reference and for others who may be having this problem:
My 8 month old Macbook Pro one day suddenly started running very slow - no clue why. It was impossible to browse the internet or use Word without extreme frustration. I found out through extensive googling that my problem was my CPU idle % was under 10% and as low as 3%. (I read online that it should never be below 80 - if it is, that means some process is draining your CPU. You can check this by going to Utilities --> System Manager --> CPU should be selected, and at the bottom of the window it shows you the percentage of idle use).
Before I figured out the specific problem, I did all of the following: verify disk permissions, reindexing Spotlight, and resetting PRAM/NVRAM as instructed by Apple (by pressing control shift option power after turning on computer but before it starts up). No luck. Once I found out the problem was CPU usage, I tried using the purge command in Terminal (Utiltiies --> Terminal --> "purge" --> enter key) according to suggestions from other users. Still no success.
The response above by AppleFixItGuy WORKED! (turn off computer, hold down ctrl shft optn power for 10 seconds, turn computer back on). I thought it wouldn't help since I'd already entered these commands while booting. But no problems thus far, 3 hours later.