drive access and progs become unresponsive - reboot fixes

I have a retail version of win8 pro. All updates have been applied. I have a 128g SSD and several SATA3 hard drives in my system. Often I'll be working on my PC and a program like photoshop or thunderbird or even explorer become unresponsive and greys out and sometimes if I wait long enough it comes back but only for a short while before it happens again.

Many times it will happen when I am accessing the file structure, i.e. file > open and other times it will happen in an explorer window when trying to access a random folder, i.e. I can browse the c:\windows folder but not the c:\windows\system32, but after waiting a bit it shows up.

Sometimes this happens with other (non system) drives.

Also, when I try to open task mgr or event viewer or many built in OS executables I immediately get an error stating:

c:\windows\system32\taskmgr.exe (or mmc.exe, etc.) The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion

A reboot fixes this problem, but only for a short while. It may even be that this only happens after coming back from sleep but I haven't spent enough time in front of the machine post-boot but pre-sleep to know for sure.

I have had some intermittent issues with coming back from sleep where either the monitors (video card is HD7870 and mobo is ASRock Z77 Pro 3 - firmware up to date) never initialize or I get the splash login screen but my usb keyboard doesn't recognize input to allow for the password prompt and the mouse cursor moves but clicking does nothing.

Does it sound like a mobo hardware issue with hybrid sleep? I like the hybrid sleep with my SSD for fast boot and wakes but I'm at a loss. Also, I had RTM before the retail version with all the same hardware and never had any of these issues.

One thought is maybe disconnecting a drive to see if its a bus issue where one drive is causing the others to become really slow reads/writes???

Oddly, my chrome browser never seems effected by this. I am typing this thread as the issue is present. I have also tried disabling my Avast AV s/w just to be sure it isn't that.

Any thoughts are greatly appreciated.

I have encountered the same problem.
After any length of inactivity the system becomes very slow and opening task manager or a browser window can take minutes to complete while the system hangs.
a reboot and everything works as should again.

I had the same problem also but it was on w7. Traced it to a bad SATA controller ( not software but hard ware)
SATA controller was integral to the mother board so I had to replace the MO. Symptom HD light on and stays on with computer hung.