The idea is to get all program preferences to default and see, if something has messed with your preferences. When everything seems to work fine on the new account, you should start moving one plist-file for certain apps by one to find where this problem lies. If you won't be able to find the faulty plist file, you should consider to change to the new account (in worst case).
However, when you have the same problem in the new account as well, then we should concentrate some more to find out, where the prob could lie