No experience with WDSmartware (I am assuming a Western Digital process), so won't know about that one.
I do suggest launching the 'Disk Utility' program found in the 'Utilities' folder in OS X (including Snow Leopard). Close all programs first, disconnect any External Drives and then launch Disk Utility.
1 - In left pane of Disk Utility, select the hard drive name that has your Snow Leopard partition on it (the partition is usually named Macintosh HD). Make sure to select the actual drive that has the sub-listing of Macintosh HD (or whatever you may have named the partition with Snow Leopard).
2 - Click the 'First Aid' tab in the main right pane of Disk Utility.
3 - Click the 'Repair Permissions' button at lower left of First Aid panel and allow it to complete. Note - there may be a long list of items in black text that indicate both issues found and permissions repaired. As long as there are no 'red text' entries in the list when it completes, all should be good.
4 - Click the 'Verify Disk' button to the right of the Repair Permissions button and allow the procedure to run. You should see a green text entry 'Disk appears to be good' toward end of list when completed. If so, you are good to go.
Note - neither of these procedures will harm anything, it is just basic maintenance and checking. Sometimes when permissions go a little sideways, you will see performance issues (especially after updating to a new OS X version).
After doing the above, quit out of Disk Utility and then launch Aperture while pressing the 'Option + Command' keys and run the 'Repair Permissions' command. This will repair any permissions issues in the library that Disk Utility may not be able to access. Note - this is also a safe operation with no inherent issues like a 'Rebuild Library' might create.
Report back as needed after those procedures. If Safari and Aperture are still behaving badly but other software runs fine (and Snow Leopard itself seems fine), there are other things that can be tried if needed. 😉
