I may be kicked out of here for saying so, but I am a very creative, scattered, silly girl who only gave in to the computer world a few months ago! I need a lot of help! I have an imac version 10.3.
First of all, something was taking too long one day to come up and the rainbow spinny thing was going on and on. So I tried to force quit, but instead it said relaunch, so I stupidly pressed it. Now I cannot get the finder to do anything. Or itunes. All my stuff I fear is gone. When the internet(which still works) is all shut down there are no words at the top of the screen except for the time! I can't shut it down either. The dumbest thing of all was that I was trying to download the old AppleIIe Oregon Trail!!
Is this the problem or was it relaunching the finder. In the about my computer, applications everything is there.
I can hear you all laughing at me!!!, but please help out a damsel in distress!! -my name is Sara.

Don't worry, you haven't lost anything
It sounds like your Finder hasn't re-launched itself for some reason, try quitting all other programs and see if that helps.

If not, hard-reboot the Mac by holding down the start button for a few seconds. If all else fails, pull out the power cord, count to 10 and reboot as usual.

If none of that works, please post more details of your Mac - Model, processor, OS version and amount of RAM and I'll get back to you, but I'm sure everything will be fine by then

Hello Sara,

Please feel free to post away with your questions. Each major question should have it's own thread for clarity on the BBS.

Enjoy your Mac. It is well worth it.

Christian

Oh,

AppleIIe Oregon Trail will not work on a Mac unless you have a emulator running, which is an advanced topic. Apple IIe programs were built in a different computer age, and will not work. The code is way out of date. Think of it as trying to burn coal inside a gas furnace.

Christian

Go to the force quit menu. If you see the finder running, relaunch it again. If that doesn't work, do what they said. If that still doesn't work, re-install 10.3 using the install disk or whatever you used. Might want to back up your data too. Or you could make it simple and upgrade to 10.4.8.