I'm experiencing a number of strange behaviors with 9.1

These things happened in this order:

The first thing I noticed was the icons for CD/DVD and CD/R-W 
disappeared from the desktop - this was .... maybe the 3rd or 4th time
rebooting a new installation - they flashed on the screen for a fraction
of a second and were gone.

A few days later;
I'm running a tone generator program under WINE - a Windoze program that
*does* work in Linux. It worked fine for a while - then suddenly WINE
would exit, failing... but if I hit 'debug' it would start and run
normally - for a day or two.
Now it detects an 'internal error' and gives the error to send to the
bugs@ address. But the program freezes and none of the options work, eg
'save as file', 'send via internet', 'cancel', 'exit program' and 
clicking on the program window to close doesn't work and top shows
wine.bin using 88% of the CPU and I must kill the process.

About the same time:

Opera (v 7.11) started acting weird. First instead of a clicked link
opening another tab in the window it started opening new windows
(settings in preferences didn't make any difference) and also it would
only save it's state from the last instance once in a while - this has
been discussed as a possible Opera problem on the Opera forums and
likely has nothing to do with my perceived Linux problem - haven't seen
the first problem mentioned there.

Next:
Although plugins are enabled and applied to XMMS, on occasion it fails
to open a stream that I listen to regularly and gives a message that the
correct plugin may not be chosen. I go to preferences and find that the
enable plugins box (for IO) has become unchecked - choosing the correct
plugin, enabling and hitting 'apply' puts things back in order and the
stream plays. This will happen after a reboot or sometimes just when
restarting the stream - when even the player hasn't been shut down.

A while later:

Using MCC I tried to install the Development packages (which I thought
I'd chosen at install time) but MCC wouldn't even allow me to check the
boxes, except for the documentation.

These are the main things although there may be something else I'm
forgetting to mention.

I'm wondering if these behaviors could be caused by a related error
somewhere affecting everything - with the possible exception of the
Opera stuff?

I've considered attempting to repair the installation using the install
disk, choosing 'upgrade' and no packages, formatting only the /
partition in hopes of correcting what *might* be the problem.
Would this be unwise?


 As a last resort, I could figure out how to back up my email and
bookmarks and start over fresh - which seems like a good idea.(I know
Windoze thinking... I'm workin' on it :)

What options are available at this point?
Where do  you begin troubleshooting problems like these?
 
I'm only beginning to get a grip on the Linux file system and so, don't
have the greatest confidence in manually editing files.

Any and all thoughts/ideas/guesses welcome.
Curt


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