Mail, Skype, Safari and some system preferences not opening

I wonder if anyone else has had this problem....my mac starts up but seems to skip loading things at the loading screen when it boots - When it gets to the desktop, Skype, mail (mac default program), and Safari do not open when clicked - I tried to go to user accounts in system preferences and that fails to open also - AIM, Fireofx and Transmit (FTP program) all work fine and are able to connect to the interent - It has done this before (months ago) and I ended up having to do a system restore to go back to factory settings - Yesterday it started this again and after 1/2 hour mail just popped open and all was well - It has been on for 4 hours so far and none of those programs are working - Has anyone else had issues like this ? any suggestions? I am using a Power Mac G5 cpu 1.8ghz and 1.25 gb of ram and 10.3.9 for system version - Any help is greatly appreciated
thanks

Have you done the basics? Repaired permissions, cleared caches, run cron jobs, booted from DVD and run disk repair etc.?
It seems that when you did a restore, which I presume is an archive and install, it cleared up then over time whatever you do is corrupting things or the drive is on its last legs. Add a new drive (cheap) , clone the boot drive to it with Super Duper (free) and boot from that for a while.

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