Cannot open desk top folders anymore

Greetings all - new Mac user here. Been totally happy for the past month but just today something strange (for me!) has happened. Hoping its an easy fix.
All of a sudden I cant open any of the folders on my desk top or using Finder - Go - I cant go to any of my folders like Home , Applications etc.
I click it and usually nothing happens.....sometime all the icons on my desk top disappear for a second then come back.
I have a new iMac 2.4 24 inch with 3 gb of ram. Running Leopard.
Any suggestions?????

Is creating a new user account a viable way of fixing this? Doesnt seem like its really fixing anything, just burying the problem. (No offense at Ebecks reply!!)
It is. The fact that you don't have any problems when you are using a different account also confirms the diagnosis - you have some corrupt/conflicting preferences files.
Two ways to deal with that: bury them or kill them - it will accomplish the same thing! user preferences files affect one user account ONLY and can not possibly interfere with your work if you switch over to a different account.
However, this might not be necessary. As I said before one way to deal with it is by using TM to restore your system to some time point before the you installed these extra programs and before the problem occured.
Another way is to try deleting some preferences files to see if that fixes the problem. The most obvious files to try are com.apple.desktop.plist and com.apple.finder.plist in the mainusername/Library/Preferences directory.
Since you can't delete them in the usual way as you can't access your folders do this:
Type "terminal" in the spotlight window and press enter. This should bring up a terminal window. type "cd Library/Preferences" (don't type the quotation marks) and press enter. Type "rm com.apple.desktop.plist" press enter. Type "rm com.apple.finder.plist" and press enter. Restart.
Hopefully, this will fix things.

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