As the original poster, I can proudly report back that this problem went away after I drastically reduced the amount of DECW items I had on my desktop. Now I only have the following DECW items and have experienced no problems over 2 weeks:

Battery, Uptime, IP Address, and RootFS Free.

I got rid of all the other DECW items and now my desktop items no longer freezes, and everything runs like a champ!