Beach ball of doom looks simular to the one below.
Repaireing premissions is a feature of OSX, accessed by programs. The routeens are built into OSX, but accessing them can be done by using a program us using the Terminal interface.
HD-->Applications-->Utilties-->Disk Utility
or
Run a program like
Onyx or
MacSweeper, or the Disk Utility. Have the programs update the prebindings, and if you can, run all the maintenance functions that they can. The former two are good tools (really just AppleScripts running routeens already built into OSX), I prefer MacSweeper
BeachBall of Doom below