A whole host of problems.

Question

All of sudden, I'm experiencing multiple problems with my MacBook Pro:
1) When I open PhotoBooth, the window doesn't appear. iSight turns on, and if I click "Take Picture" on the menu bar it does, but I can't see the picture because there's no window.
2) Video chat no longer works. In AIM, when I click on the video chat icon, nothing even happens. No iSight, no nothing.
3) Word isn't working. When I attempt to type, absolutely nothing happens. This occurs both in old and new documents.
4) Some of the icons in my menu bar are only half appeared. For example, I see the outline of my battery, but no indication of how full it is (it's typically black or red inside the battery, and I no longer see that). Also, I can see the "hands" of Time Machine, but not the clock itself.
5) The last time I shut it down, the start-up time was scarily long. Minutes went by before anything happened, and that's completely unusual.
I ran Sophos, and a threat was detected and cleaned up, but I don't know how to proceed from here. I'm afraid to turn off my computer for fear that it won't reboot, and my external hard drive is nowhere to be found (I just moved), so I haven't backed up any of my data. Clearly I need to find my external/buy a new one, but where else do I go from here? Do I take it in, or is there something else I can do?

Answer 1

First off the virus checker stuff you are using is useless and worthless and generally will muck up your system. What had you done recently before all the issues happened?