Newbie with a 17" iMac

As the subject line suggests I am a newbie to the Mac world. I have been using a PC my entire life and consider myself a power user in the PC world. Although I have used a PC my entire life it has been forced upon me and have dreamed of owning a Mac for some time. Fortunately for me Santa spoiled me this year and I am now a proud owner of a 17" iMac! One of the first things that I did was upgrade the OS to Panther. After doing so I have had a problem running the preloaded World Book Encylopedia that came on the Hard Drive. Anytime I tried to run it the application would crash and the OS would ask if I wanted to send an error report to Apple. In my frustration I decided to try and reinstall the application. So I put the CD in the drive and the OS promptly tells me that the application is already installed. With the message is a an icon called "Launch World Book" to run World Book. When I click the icon the app still crashes. No problem I think to myself... I will just uninstall and reinstall. So I trash the folder in my Applications directory and figured I could start fresh. Unfortunately for me I was sadly mistaken and now when I put the CD in I get the same message. When I click on the launch icon now Script Writer runs. What do I do?? Is there still reminence of the World Book App somewhere on my hard drive that is confusing the OS? I read somewhere that to uninstall all you need to do is throw the application icon in the trash??? Apparenltly this is incorrect. If anyone has any insight into my problem your help would be greatly appreciated. Please help this poor newbie...

This is very abnormal. I don't know how to fix it. Normally you would just drag it to the trash unless it was some kind of special application.

well since you just upgraded to panther what i suggest doing is reinstalling panther except this time do a clean install. Clean installs are always the best way to go since you wont have any sort of conflicts with programs not loading correctly.

to do a clean install
put in the panther CD
restart the computer
hold down C to boot from disc
follow instructions and at the installation type screen select clean

We tried the clean install and we were quite disapointed to see that we lost half of the software that came preinstalled onto the computer. It wasn't until several hours later that we realized that we just forgot to install them after we installed the OS (they should be on a separate cd). By that time it was too late and when we tried to install them we got an internal system error. So now we are on the second clean install and we are in the same place we started. We have decided to contact the company that created World Book to see if there is a download or a patch that we can install.

Thanks for taking the time to replying to our distress call...