Desktop Issues

Everything on my desktop disappears except the wallpaper whenever I move items from one file to another. I will be able to move one or 2 things and all of the sudden everything closes, icons and dashboard go missing and poof, 4-5 seconds later everything will come back. When it does come back though all the files I had open to swap from one to the other are closed back down. It's very annoying when trying to copy files to a burn file. What should take me less than a minute will take 4-5 minutes. I'm not sure if this is a software or hardware issue. I searched the forum but didn't see anything quite like this.