[dmdsoftware]

Did a fresh start via a utility in the programs menu. All my settings were erased but didn't take too long to set them back.
So far so good. I went to reinstall the repos I had before, but many are now empty despite doing a force refresh...but that's another issue.
dmdsoftware, I am forced to do a hard restart when it crashes. I may have a corrupt file system indeed. I will look into how to fix that now. Any ideas or links?
Thanks for the help everyone

If you use linux, you can plug the SD card into your PC and run fsck -f to check and fix the filesystem. It'll tell you if there is corruption, but if there is, it's probably not reversible at this stage.

[pipewrencher]

I'm not sure what the issue was exactly, but I ran the 'fresh start' xbmc add on and all is good. (I just got my pi and wanted to fool around with some program addons to see what they do...probably didn't have to go as far as using fresh start to fix the problem, but hey, it worked.)
As far as the background change I mentioned, it corrected itself once I ran the 'xbmc hubwizard'.
The slow moving 'working' icon revolves much quicker after running the wizard too. I was told that was just esthethics, but I'm glad it's back to the way it was when i received it.
I have much to learn.
Thanks for all the help

[miappa]

http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=XBMC_HUB_Wizard

[tekno]

ok thank you. It's boggling because the problem started just today! I will see what I can do to get better power.
Any ideas why the 'working' icon in the lower right corner of the screen has slowed to a crawl.

I have now seen this problem on ubuntu 14.04 linux based systems and osmc based systems. Yes it started recently and apparently is the result of either an addon or repository which is installed, but not sure which yet.

At least on the ubuntu 14.04 system running sudo apt-get upgrade seems to prevent the restarting (with kodi 16.0)