Bizarre issue - Any help?

Hi all
Just found this site while searching the internet in desperation for any suggestions as to what has gone wrong with my Aspire One. I'm hoping that someone with more Linux knowledge than me can shed some light!
Okay, I've had my Apsire One for a little over a year now and, bar a few minor hiccups, its worked fine. I've turned it on this morning however and it has all gone horribly wrong.
When the machine boots I get the usual, default desktop but none of the file exploration programs links work (My Documents, My Videos etc) and it cannot see any network devices on the wireless. I launched a terminal window to see if I could have a look around the hard-disk but the Terminal simply presents me with a solid black oblong of a cursor and I can enter no text at all. Eventually I right-clicked on the desktop and selected filemanager from there. This showed "Home" on the left as always but there was nothing to explore. Selecting the option to display Full Tree I can see the contents of the disk 9all seems okay at a cursory glance) and if I go to the "home" folder all my file are indeed still there.

Applications such as office and Firefox still launch (though I cannot get any network connection still) and if I manually explore to the right folder on the disk I can still open files.

Odd, huh? So - anyone got any suggestions? I am away from home at the moment so I cannot instantly turn to the recovery disk (though I am downloading an image of it as I type) but I would like to avoid using that anyway as I have a LOT of work on the drive.

Cheers in advance.

 

Dear, i have the same issue, exactly the same, i will go for a format, but i don't know what is the easiest way to fromat.
rgs.