HOW TO STOP APPLICATION NO RESPONDING ISSUES ON ANDROID

Application Not Responding... all of them, need to restart

So I'm at a loss... I tried searching for a similar problem but nothing I found was quite like whats happening to me, if I'm mistaken please redirect me there, thats why I posted.

Motorola Photon 4G (MB855) that is Rooted
Android 2.3.5
Aquired the phone about 1 year ago, been rooted since that time, has not been dropped/wet/etc

I know some of this information is probaby useless but its the best description of the problem I think I can provide without knowing that much about whatevers going on...

Problem:
Application not responding dialogue pops up, most times it has two options (force close, wait), but sometimes it has three (+ report). It comes up at apparently random times, as I don't know what triggers it, nor do I know how to trigger it on purpose. It may happen while I'm using my phone, or while the screen is off, and at any battery level. It may happen when there is perfect phone signal, when WiFi is on, on Airplane mode, or anywhere in between. Whatever happens to be open at the moment is what stops responding: usually the Home application (because most times the screen is off when it happens), but has already happened with pretty much any application I use. No matter which option I chose the phone never returns to functionality, my only resort at that time is to restart the phone. Pressing 'wait' leaves a frozen phone that eventually displays the dialogue again a few seconds later as many times as I chose that option, 'force close' leaves a black screen, and 'report' does nothing.

Oddly, the lockscreen remains perfectly functional though the clock is frozen and displays the time when the error happened. In fact I usually find out it has happened only hours later when I turn on the screen and the error is waiting for me on unlock. Doesn't seem to happen at particular times or intervals. Pressing the power button to turn the screen on/off or to display the silent mode/airplane mode/power off options also works, but nothing else does. If the music player is on, the current song will play until the end but the next one will not begin. Sometimes the top bar where the time, signal bars, and battery level are located is lost and replaced by all black, or in the case of the lockscreen it will then stretch that little bit further to the edge of the screen.

It happens several times a day, about 3 on average. It started about a month ago and I deleted the last application I had installed prior to the problem but it persisted. It was the only one I had installed in a while. I'm not a programmer or anything like that developing any applications that might provoke this.

What have I tried?
Well like I said I deleted the last installed application, deleted a bunch of other applications that I wasn't using, cleared caches, I transferred a lot of applications to SD card, I have all the updates I can find for applications and the system in general, had task-killers running (with careful while lists) that I'm now completely disabling as the latest thing to try. I installed a logcat application but I really don't know a lot about it... in my research I learned it might provide some information but its utterly incomprehensable to me.

Getting a new phone... factory resets... yeah sounds like that might solve the problem, but I'm looking for fixes that preserve the tons of settings I've spent so much time fine tuning... any ideas??? I'll be glad to provide more information that's actually useful just as soon as I know what to look for... so let me know, thanks.