To me, that sounds a lot more like either old fashioned operating system corruption (a sad fact of life with Windows, especially the 9x/Me series), or possibly a virus.
Assuming you have an up to date virus scanner and it hasn't detected anything, then you're looking at reformatting and reinstalling everything if you want to fix the problem.
And as for how it is you tell these sorts of things. Experience is the only real teacher. I think most of the experts here are in the same boat as me, and at some point were completely clueless about computers. We broke things quite regularly, and learned by fixing the things we broke. Do it long enough, and you start to figure out what sort of symptoms are typical of what problem, and possible solutions to the problem.
How do you tell whats causing a specific problem? sometimes when I click on an icon on the desktop or system tray or quick launch, the program will not startup, if I delete that program icon shortcut and make a new one it will work again for awhile, but then it will stop responding again. The system seems to be running a bit slower than usual also, I have defragged a few times but still have these probs. I'm running an old AMD K62 500 with Win 98 SE, what would cause this? Hard drive going bad, memory going bad, processor going bad? or something else? how do you tell?
Thanks, any help is appreciated...

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