Help! Crazy things happening to computer!

I watched a video file today, and when QuickTime opened up, all the words on the menu were replaced by A's with boxes around them.
I restarted the computer, then ALL of the words on the desktop and menu bars are replaced by these symbols. The only way items are legible is through list form.
Now, I can't open certain applications (Preview, Photoshop, AppleWorks) due to various errors. For Preview, it says "You cannot use the application Preview on this version of Mac OS X.
The other two apps show error messages like this:
The application "AppleWorks" could not be launched because of a shared library error: "-<AppleWorks><CarbonLib><CFMPriv_CarbonCore>"
Also, Console says this over and over again "plist parse failed; the data is not proper UTF-8."
I'm stumped, and I hope it's not a virus of some kind.

You could try this firs:
1. Reboot from the install disk, and then go to the menu bar and select Disk Utility and run both Repair functions on your startup drive
2. When it finishes restart again and hold down the Shift key when you hear the chime
3. This will boot into Safe Mode, run the Repair Disk function again, and also delete a number of cache file (especially some font ones), because of these activities the boot process will take rather longer than normal
4. If it then boots into your normal Desktop, and all the menus appear as usual, go to Restart and do a normal boot
It's not a virus of any kind. You've got disk corruption, and evidently the file or files that are corrupt are critical ones. If you get a message that the disk can't be repaired you could try buying a copy of Disk Warrior. If you have all your data backed up it would probably be just as fast to erase the drive and reinstall.
Francine
Francine
Schwieder

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