iBook G3 constantly spinning wheel..

Hello, my mom has an iBook G3 with Tiger, which she uses solely for checking emails and light internet browsing. A couple days ago, her curser turned into the spinning wheel, and hasn't stopped. She can move the curser around, and the desktop shows up fine, so it isn't frozen. I guess she had to do a hard shut down a couple times in order to turn it off, but is going to try letting the battery run down so it will shut down that way. The only time the wheel turns back into the regular pointer is when she highlights the wireless icon at the top right corner of the desktop. Again, she doesn't have any programs or anything like that on the computer, and only uses it for the internet once and a while. Any ideas on what to do about this?

Thanks,
Andrew