Applications frequently become permanently unresponsive I frequently have applications become unresponsive while they're in the background. That is, I'm not able to switch back to them*, and the Force Quit Applications window shows them as "Not Responding". They never become responsive again no matter how long I wait. 

Some features that make this problem unusual:


It's not limited to one or two applications. It's happened with MS Office applications, Textedit, BBEdit, Evernote, OpenOffice, Preview, and others.  
It's not limited to times when the application is doing something intensive. In fact, it usually happens to apps that have been in the background and not doing anything in particular. 
I've never observed it to happen to web browsers or to music players that are playing music. 
It doesn't seem to be triggered by other applications doing things that are CPU or memory-intensive.
Other applications are not slowing down or hanging when it happens.
The non-responding application shows &lt; 1% CPU usage in Activity Monitor. 
If I force quit the application and restart it, then the problem usually doesn't recur quickly. 


Does this suggest any potential causes or troubleshooting steps? I know the usual advice is to either start with a new account or disable all of my other programs and customizations one by one, but I'm hoping that the specific features of this problem might help me proceed in a more targeted way.  

System info: 
Macbook Pro, 2012 model, OS 10.9.4, 8GB RAM, 500GB HDD with 160GB free

* Specifically, what I mean is that I can cmd-tab to the application's icon, but the program in the foreground doesn't change. If I expose one of its windows, I can move the window around, but clicking in it doesn't bring the application to the foreground or affect the contents of the window. Notably, I do not get the beachball / pinwheel pointer when hovering over it, as I do in other cases when an application is stuck. 

update: 

Here's the system log from an incident when OpenOffice became unresponsive. I discovered it at 8:17. I don't know exactly when it failed, but the last log message and the last revision time on my auto-saved files is 7:46, so I assume it was within 5 minutes of that. Note that the OpenOffice error in the log (appears as soffice) shows up twice, five minutes apart, meaning that the first one wasn't fatal and so I suspect the second wasn't the cause of the hang either.
OK,

I will work with you on this step by step.

First to eliminate the following:

process plugin-container[1362] caught causing excessive wakeups. EXC_RESOURCE supressed due to audio playback
9/11/14 7:58:33.000 AM kernel[0]: process firefox[1359] caught causing excessive wakeups. Observed wakeups rate (per sec): 163; Maximum permitted wakeups rate (per sec): 150; Observation period: 300 seconds; Task lifetime number of wakeups: 61563


These messages are triggered by a plugin that you're running.

Go to Tools : Add-Ons : Plugins (in Firefox), and one-by-one, for each plugin listed, please do the following:

1) Disable the plugin.
2) Restart Firefox and check if you still see the message.


Update and part 2:


Your Preview is generating lots of problems?

Lets start with obvious.


  Open Preview:
  
  File,
  
  Open Recent,
  
  Clear Menu


The reason: There seems to be a croup file in your Preview.