Thanks for the replies everyone. Unfortunately, none of this is working. Don't know why the diagnostics don't kick in when the "D" key is held down but I imagine it's related to the portion of my post where the progress bar comes up every time on boot for half an hour. It is doing a fschk because there probably is directory or partition damage and probably ignores the "D" key.
I'm sure this is a side effect of all the crashes I've had lately as it didn't originally do an fschk each time when all the problems started. But to make sure directory damage wasn't the cause of the problem I went ahead and wiped the entire drive, reinstalled the whole OS, apps, and... same !@#$% problem this morning! Goes to all black screen and then hangs. I have to force restart again.
I did manage to find and download the Apple Service Diagnostic disc and ran that. Performed 10 loops of tests overnight and everything came back perfect so I really don't think hardware or memory is to blame.
And yes, I have the latest firmware installed for my machine. Again, my machine is about 6 years old at this point. Lion isn't the snappiest but still ran perfectly fine under 10.7.1. I am more and more convinced that 10.7.2 is the problem. Everything started going south after this update. And there have beeen TONS of reported problems from other people on this if you do a Google search for "10.7.2 constantly hanging crashing".
I don't have any files in my trash and regularly empty it. At this point I am at a complete loss. I'm just praying that the imminent release of 10.7.3 will fix these problems.
UGH!
