Freezing, or crashing?
ID on the Mac can produce reports that may (or may not) prove helpful in diagnosing the problem. I suspect this is something not directly related to InDesign, and maybe not to any of the Adobe apps directly since you seem to be having a problem in more than one. That often inidcates a problem at the system level.
Nevertheless, it won't hurt to try to gather the reports. You'll find driections for how to generate them, and to post them on Pastebin.com (then put a link to them here) so we can see what's going on at Adobe Forums: InDesign CS5.5 Not Responding
Do you happen to run a font manager? If so, which one, and waht version?