I had to shut off my system unexpectedly and I believe some files got corrupted.  I was able to fix most of the bad data from booting from the livecd (Mepis) and running e2fsck, but there are still some quirks residing.

For example when I run "apt-get update" I get the following error message:

E: Could not get lock /var/lib/dpkg/lock - open (11 Resource temporarily unavailable)
E: Unable to lock the administration directory (/var/lib/dpkg/), is another process using it?

Also I noticed that when I go to open Firefox, it takes minutes to come up.  Once Firefox is eventually opened, other instanced open normally.

A Windows sidenote to Firefox (and equally true in Linux to a degree).

Windows IE already is semi-pre-loaded when you call it. It is integrated into Windows itself therefore there is less to load when it is called.

Firefox on all platforms is a full-featured (non-stripped-down) browser. Unlike other browsers, there are a lot more files to open than in others and therefore Firefox will take a bit longer to load.

Any excessive load times could spell something is definately wrong though.