None of my apps will start...

Hi everyone,

I'm new to this forum and fairly new to Macs in general (about 5 months). I have an iMac with OS X Leopard and I absolutely love it. It's never given me any grief until now...

Last night I left my computer for about 20 minutes to make dinner. All I had running (aside from Finder which always runs in the background) was Firefox (with only one tab open, to a simple HTML page), uTorrent (I always have it running), and VMware Fusion - I have a virtual machine with Windows XP. On my virtual machine, all I had going was Windows Live Messenger.

When I got back, I saw that my virtual machine had randomly powered itself off. I was annoyed but not entirely surprised (because hey, it is Windows after all), so I told Fusion to start it back up. Fusion, however, didn't do what it was told, so I closed it and used Force Quit since it wasn't responding. Then I tried re-launching it, and it just bounced in the dock for about a minute and nothing happened.

This is where things went from annoying to scary. I found that I was unable to open even simple apps like TextEdit... they all just bounced in the dock and sat there. I couldn't even open Terminal, Activity Monitor or System Prefs! uTorrent and Firefox were still running, and working just fine. I can open a Finder window, but I can't eject mounted drives with it. I can bring up my Dashboard most of the time, though sometimes it just darkens the screen without showing my gadgets.

I'm wary about rebooting the computer in case nothing will open at all when it tries to start up. I've been burned in the past by restarting a computer when it's had problems, which usually results in an expensive trip to a repair shop. Does anyone have any suggestions??

Thanks,

~SC

Unfortunately, this type of problem is best fixed by a simple reboot. If anything goes badly, you should be able to restore from your Time Machine backup. (Have you been making backups?)

Regards.