apps not loading in 9.04

[awg1011]

Recently while using Firefox with a whole bunch of tabs open, FF crashed, then wouldn't reload, nothing would load. I rebooted, FF still wouldn't load, a few apps would load, I checked for updates and installed a few, it required a reboot, which I did and everything seemed to be working. I shut it down and and went to bed. Next morning, boot it up and nothing loaded.

When I try to open something, in the task bar I will see "starting <app>" then it disappears. When I try to open terminal it will show up for about 2 seconds and disappears. Some of the games will open and work, but that's it.

Now it gets even stranger, I have a second partition with Kubuntu 9.04 installed, boot it up and nothing will load on it either.

My PC is home built, 2.5Ghz (OCed to 3.0Ghz) P4, 2 gigs RAM, 40 GB hdd, GeForce FX 5200 pci video. I've had 9.04 installed for many months now without any problems until now.

Any ideas of what might be going on and how to fix it?

Thanks.

[awg1011]

Well, I think I found the problem, a bad memory stick. I'm running a mem test right now, one stick at a time, to find the faulty one. I've never dealt with bad memory (besides my own;)), I wasn't aware that it could cause this kind of failure.