Hopefully Cartman's still around, or somebody else who knows about Linux. (It's Ubuntu 8.10 specifically.)
When I double-click a folder location on the desktop, all the icons disappear for several seconds while the cursor switches to the 'waiting' cursor, and then the file browser never opens. If I manually run 'nautilus' from a terminal the folder opens, but when I double-click any item inside the file browser window disappears along with the desktop icons. The icons come back but the file browser doesn't, and whatever I double-clicked didn't open (be it video or audio or text or whatever). How can I find out what's wrong?