Finder & most applications quitting unexpectedly

I'm opening a new topic on this because I've gone through the ones already existing and none of the solutions seems to be helping.

Some specs:

OSX 10.6.8 Snow Leopard

Processor 2.2 GHz Intel Core i7

Memory 16G (newly installed a few months ago) 1333 MHz DDR3

The problem:

My system kept slowing down/freezing/giving me the spinning wheel of death so I checked the Permissions, Repaired them even though what was off seemed benign. I verified Disk and it was fine. I did have an external hard drive that was acting funny so I ran the Disk Verify there and it was corrupted, so I Disk Repaired, and the second Disk Verify came back clean. In the days leading up to this, other applications like Chrome and Safari also quit unexpectedly, and Chrome was incredibly laggy. Mail and Skype never crashed though (I saw that was a symptomatic issue for others). Also, if it's important, it takes me exactly 2 executions of "restart" or "shut down" for the system to do it. The first execution does nothing.

Now, I have the Finder in its entirey quitting unexpectedly (including navbar at the top which blacks out and just leaves an imprint of the icons).

What I did:

1) Reboot, didn't do anything.

2) Safe Booted (with Shift), the Finder appears but it disgustingly slow, so Rebooted normally. Same problem.

3) Option!Booted, tried to delete the com.apple.finder file (got it into trash but then the Trash wouldn't open so I could empty it). Also got a com.apple.finder.[gibberish] in that same area so I tried to delete that too. Also got com.apple.sidebarlists.plist and com.apple.recentitems.plist in the Trash. Rebooted normally, the Finder worked but I noticed the Trash hadn't empties so I was able to empy the trash, then Rebooted. Finder quit unexpectedly as soon as the system boots up.

4) During the window of usage in #3, I ran my terminal to search for some Flashback trojan some people were talking about but it came back empty.

5) Safe Booted (Shift) again to get my specs for this post and I was able to, but when I closed the little window, Finder quit unexpectedly in safe boot. (I f

Does this sound familiar to anyone? Does anyone have a solution I haven't tried yet? And if that solution is to boot from the disk, I'd like to mitigate as much loss as possible (naturally). I already have most of my stuff backed up so that isn't a huge problem. What I don't want to lose are my browser preferences (bookmarks, history). I found Application Support/Google/Chrome but do I just take the whole folder or just a specific file? I remember doing it for my iTunes playlists but that was just a .plist file, not an entire folder.