Need a Little Help

It seems my daughter snuck into the computer room and sabotaged the iMac. I'm not too familiar with all things mac and need a little help. Number 1, the icons on the desktop do not stay there all the time....you have to move your cursor all the way down to the bottom of the screen to get them to show up. I can not figure out how to make them constantly stay on the desktop. Also, My downloads are not showing up. If I click on downloads, it brings all my download icons up but they are all empty with a dotted line border around where the picture would be. Any ideas of what might have happened to all my downloads?

Thanks for any help or suggestions.

The icons in the bottom I'm assuming means the Dock, so click on the Apple logo in the top left, then Dock and "Turn Hiding On", ensure that it is unchecked. This will make the Dock visible at all times..

The dotted box shows up first on the Downloads folder, but the icon/preview should fill up the boxes fairly quickly..

Can you confirm that you have the Downloads folder and it isn't gone by any chance?

Regards

Fixed the problem with the dock...that was easy enough. I still can not view the downloads. Also, I just noticed that in my documents folder, those files seem to be gone now as well. They only have the dotted line around the icon. I can confirm I have a downloads folder because it is there on the dock but as I said only the names of the downloads show up with the dotted line and no picture inside the dotted lines. Stumped.

It could be that your Finder plist is corrupt. Go here: HD/Users/YourUserName/Library/Preferences and move this file: com.apple.finder.plist to your Desktop.
Restart the computer. This will make a new Finder plist file with default settings.
Report your result here.

Thank You Raz0rEdge

That repaired the problem. I really appreciate it. It was driving me nuts. Learned something today!

Great! So, if you haven't already done so, you can Trash the old plist file.