Applications won't launch (but secretly do!)

[tak!TAK!]

I'm having trouble opening applications. On startup when I click to launch ANY application the docking icon bounces but the application never loads. After about a minute the icon stops bouncing and the application fails to launch.

The rainbow 'clock' appears and on force quit the applications are classed as open but wont quit.

Basically things are a bit screwy! This has suddenly happened in the past few days.

If this was OS9 I might be able to fix this - but I don't have a clue in OSX - where should I be looking and what is good practice in solving bugs / problems in OSX

Thanks

Dom

 

[Captain Code]

Try rebooting into single user mode and run fsck -y until it reports that no disk changes were made.