Emac Crashes With Any Application. Please Help?

Question

Can anyone please help?
I have had an Emac computer for years now.  I hardly ever use it, but it has a lot of my old video files and documents on it.  I mainly work with my macbook pro.  Until recently, my Emac has been working fine, but I tried to use it today and it seems to suddenly be fubar.
Here's what happened.  I wanted to take an old (.mov) video file and transfer it to my macbook pro.  I used an 8GB pen drive.  The transfer to the pen drive seemed to take literally no time, but the video file also still seemed to play from the pen drive on the Emac, so I thought it was fine.  Took it to the macbook pro.  The video file wouldn't play, it was just a black screen for the duration of the video.
I decided to try and export another version on the Emac, in case that would help.  I had a version I'd colour-corrected in Final Cut Express, so I opened that.  The Emac then did what I have this evening learned is a "kernel panic".  I didn't know what that was though, so I tried again and the same thing.
The original edit of the video had been done in iMovie, so I tried to open that next.  It opened, but as soon as I tried to play the video, "kernel panic".
I tried again and no "kernel panic", but everything crashed and the entire system became unresponsive, so I had to restart.
I decided I would try to burn the .mov onto a CD and transfer it that way.  During the burning process, the system crashed.  When I restarted, the computer was unable to read anything on the disc.
I then went to do some online research.  When I opened firefox, the system crashed.
Can anyone tell me what's going on and how I can start to go about getting things working again?
Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

Sorry. Been under the weather with a flu bug that triggered some "loverly" asthma things! Good to see you back, although I had hoped it would be to say you had the old eMac all sorted and learning new tricks.
I'm rather at a standstill here. The fact that the capacitors you can see are not affected doesn't necessarily mean those that are elsewhere under the cover are also OK. There are reports that people have removed the logic board to find the hidden capacitors leaking even though the ones visible in the RAM door were fine
Because a PRAM battery tests at 3.6V in hand doesn't always mean it's producing that under load when installed. However, the eMacs are not so picky about PRAM battery power as older models, and there are a couple of easy things that get you around a dead/weak battery anyway:
1) Boot from a system CD/DVD, then immediately restart booting from  the hard drive.
2) Boot while holding command + option + p + r and keep holding that combo until you hear a total of three startup chimes, then let go the keys and allow booting to continue.
The first method uses startup values from the optical disk and the second one resets the computer's PRAM back to factory defaults.
I keep coming back to your symptoms being the same as the eMac I worked with that WAS in the affected SN range. The computer would boot fine, but any app opened crashed within seconds.
.  I feel like you need some cheap or free hands-on help with this--at least someone you can talk to on the phone in real time. Have you looked for a Mac User Group (MUG) near you? I know you live where the population density can put neighbors miles away and some cities light-years away, but a MUG is a good place to find a guru on older models. The other option would be to ask of the IT staff (the worker-bees, not the bosses) at a school of university that has used Macs. Some great resources there.  Here's the find-a-MUG link:  http://appleusergroupresources.com/find-a-group/  We just retired our last eMac. My wife has been using a 1.42G model almost exactly 7 years and, as she's more into social networking now to stay in touch with our adult children, and our tax software will no longer run on PowerPC. I talked her into a refurbed iMac 21.5-inch mid-2011 we got directly from Apple for under US$1000. Nice computer.