Sounds like some sort of memory failure gimmick, especially considering Photoshop and Football Manager are the most memory hungry programs of all time.
Would say the hard drive because of the clicking, but if stuff opens fine in safe mode, can't think it would be that. May as well check it first though as it's easier. Right click on your hard drive in my computer, select properties and on one of the tabs, you should have an option to run scandisk and defrag. Do both of them and see any errors.
If that's clean as a whistle, try
memtest.