Disappearing Menu Bar Icons

The icons in my menu bar (rt. side), started scrolling one at a time from rt. to left. They eventually dissapeared. I did an archive and install, (I don't remember how to do a complete clean install on Panther). The Genus bar guy booted with an external system, and it worked fine. Other facts: My desktop prefs don't regenerate, When restarting the machine, the menu bar stuff reappears, then scrolls then dissapears.
1. How do you do a clean install (not archive and install.
2. What the hell is going on?

also I ran disk warrior and drive 10. no change.