i'm running suse 9.1 and lately it's been extremely laggy. today it froze up and crashed and whenever i try to use the keyboard to logout out it just closes the bar and desktop icons and they pop right back up (like it was just being refreshed) and my mouse cursor moves but the white arrow turns into a little grey head (i'm guessing it's a skull) or something. is this a virus or something built in to suse to tell em something has screwed up? i'm about to reformat it anyways but i was just curious if anybody knew what was causing this?

Boot from SuSE CD 1, when the boot screen comes up choose install, when asked for type of install (New, Upgrade...) pick repair. Pick expert and then tell it to check everything listed, this may take a while, and let it fix anything wrong.