Mail and OS apps crashing, please advise!

Hello I've done some homework and would appreciate some advice on what I ought to do next.

Lately my mid 2010 MBPro is hard to wake up in the morning, then I end up with crashes and restarting. Mail seems particularly cranky and I've tried to sort out the various accounts to streamline that. Most recently, Mail fails to get any messages, even though internet connection is fine. Efforts to reestablish connection don't work, and then basic OS apps like Text Edit, Finder, Activity Monitor become non-reponsive as well. Even shutting down is an ordeal, because the computer seems to think these things are running and hangs up while doing the restart. I'm pretty sure I've had to use the button on the MBP each time I've restarted. Today it held on the grey screen for what seemed like a long time (maybe a few minutes in reality 🙂)

Here's what I've tried so far:

Yesterday:

Verified with Disk Utility (boot + cmd-R) it reported no problems.

Restarted and Booted in Safe Mode. Saw no problems and restarted, hoping this might help.

Because Firefox appeared to be eating a lot of CPU, I switched over to Chrome for the time being. I also de-selected iCloud to keep apps (like TextEdit) from getting hung up on that. Also disconnected my iCal from iCloud.

Last night, things seemed ok (not necessarily better, since the problems generally occur overnight.) I left the MBP for the evening and I can see now that an email came in around 9:30, but nothing after that, though mail was picked up by my devices shortly after 9:30. Console indicates that after 9:30, it got into a lengthy "Calendar Agent" snarl.

1/15/14 2:07:00.784 AM CalendarAgent[226]: [com.apple.calendar.store.log.caldav.queue] [Account xxxxxxxx@gmail.com@https://calendar.google.com/calendar/dav/xxxxxx40gmail.com/user/ timed out when executing operation: <CalDAVAccountRefreshQueueableOperation: 0x7f814a8e9ed0; Sequence: 0>]

1/15/14 2:07:00.869 AM CalendarAgent[226]: [com.apple.calendar.store.log.caldav.queue] [Account refresh failed with error: Error Domain=NSURLErrorDomain Code=-1001 "The request timed out." UserInfo=0x7f814ab56210 {NSUnderlyingError=0x7f814ab57930 "The request timed out.", NSErrorFailingURLStringKey=https://xxxxxxx%40gmail.com@calendar.google.com/calendar/dav/jxxxxxxxxxx%40gmail .com/user///xxxxxxx%40gmail.com@calendar.google.com/calendar/dav/jxxxxxxxxxx%40gmail.com/user/, NSErrorFailingURLKey=https://jxxxxxxxx%40gmail.com@calendar.google.com/calendar/dav/xxxxxxxx%40gmail. com/user///jxxxxxxxx%40gmail.com@calendar.google.com/calendar/dav/xxxxxxxx%40gmail.com/user/, AccountName=Gmail, CalDAVErrFromRefresh=YES, NSLocalizedDescription=The request timed out.}]

And it goes on and on like that for quite a while (I put "xxx" where my name was. Hope that's ok?!)

So this morning I went into iCal and disconnected the Google calendar (which I don't even use and had no idea was tied into iCal) I also went into Google and did my best to disable it there. I'm relatively new to Gmail and Google Docs, but am using both of those (and Google Groups) a lot for work lately. I have one Gmail account, but two other gmail accounts point to it and I use those for work. I have a couple more email accounts too. Mail hasn't really worked very well for me, so it might be time to delete the accounts and start fresh, which scares me a bit.

I've got the console "System Diagnostic" reports from the past few days, but don't really know what to do with them. Realizing I am in over my head, I would welcome any advice before I do anything else!

Other details that might help: i started using Spotify a few months ago, but wonder if that could be part of the problem. I haven't run it recently and don't need to.

I keep the MBP docked to a 27" Cinema Display, in case that matters.

I just downloaded Recovery Disk Assistant and made myself a thumb drive. I'm good about backups (Time Machne plus Carbon Copy Cloner. The latter is scheduled to run overnight and appears to be doing so, but I am not 100% certain)

I run Autocad and Photoshop for the most part. With 8GB of RAM, they run just fine. I'd say the big problems appear to be with the native apps like Text Edit and others that were set by default to save to iCloud. I rarely even open iPhoto anymore, it's such a hog, and I never set it up to accept PhotoStream. I need this computer for work, and use iPad and iPhone for new photos and cloud "features." Overall, I'm pretty conservative about updates and upgrades. I'd be happy to go back to Snow Leopard to be honest. Mavericks is a non-starter, because my version of Autocad is not supported. Also the last couple of OS updates have left me less than impressed. Thanks for reading all that!

Thank you in advance for any advice!!!