It's never 'hopeless', Robin!
Your system configuration/settings/.plist/whatever is just a little crooked, that's all. And, you need to straighten 'er up some. Just a little system cleanup should take care of some of your difficulties. You need to make sure that your problem is only with your user, by creating and logging in to a fresh user account, and testing that those issues don't happen with that other user.
Come back here, there's some good folks here that can help you through this - 'hopeless', indeed!