mac's acting odd. . . help!

[delfinium5]

about a week ago my mac (G4 dual processor, 10.4.3) started acting really scary. I was cleaning out my iphoto file and fonts. I had tried to put two chinese fonts auto-installed with Tiger in the garbage and everything seemed to go haywire.
1. all desktop icons disappeared
2. things started blinking on/off (cursor and top menu bar)
3. cannot send anything to print, cursor just spins endlessly.
4. iphoto library - gone! (thank you for the backup in another hard drive, but what's up with that?)

Is it a coincidence that last nite my ebay account was compromised? I have just finished straightening out all that. But I am left wondering what is happening.

My dock seems to be functional for internet use/itunes/addressbook. . .items that were on my desktop can be located through Preferences.

I have rebuilt desktop and gone through Utilities/Repair disk and permissions. Nothing has changed though.

Biggest annoyance is not being able to print at this point. My husband is being an impatient idiot - what a headache this is turning into. Help.

[nixgeek]

Have you tried creating another administrative account and logging in with that to see if it's a global issue or just related to that specific user account?

Also, how did you go about deleting the fonts? Did you use Font Book? Be careful when you go removing fonts becuase it might be that you had deleted a font that the operating system is using. A coworker if mine deleted a bunch of fonts and some of them were system-related. All of a sudden things went nuts until she replaced them back into Font Book from the Trash (thankfully she hadn't emptied the Trash).

Worst case scenario, you might have to perform a clean install of the system by selecting the Archive and Install option. This will preserve all your documents and apps while only replacing the System folder.

Good luck.

[nixgeek]

BTW, if you need to do any maintenance to your OS X system, download OnyX and use that. Works great and gets rid of anything the operating system doesn't need anymore.