I can't drag items!!

As of this morning, I have the strangest problem I have ever had with my Mac.

The problem is that I can't drag items. I can drag windows to move and resize them, I can drag scrollbar widgets to scroll, and I can click and drag to draw in Photoshop &c, but I cannot drag items. For instance, I cannot move files in the Finder, I cannot drag messages to move them to other mailboxes in Mail, I cannot drag songs to playlists in iTunes, I cannot drag links on pages in Safari (although I can drag bookmark bar items to move them), I cannot drag selected words inside TextEdit, and I cannot drag files to my FTP server in GoLive. When I try to drag, the system doesn't respond. Nothing freezes; the items just sit right where they are as if I weren't touching them.

It is not a hardware problem; such dragging works neither with my trackpad nor my Apple Pro Mouse. Nor does my system need a restart; a restart did me no good.

My system was working normally until the problem quietly and suddenly began about a half hour ago.

I am using a PowerBook G4 400/512 and OS X 10.2.4.

What in hell is going on?

Additionally, I have just discovered another aspect of it: if I command-click Menu Bar Items (with the intent of moving them), they immediately "poof" into oblivion as if I had dragged them off the bar and let go. Then, all the Menu Bar Items disappear and restart themselves after a few seconds.

Yeah, I figured I'd have to reinstall. I already tried repairing permissions, it didn't do anything. I'm backing my disk up to my external firewire now.

Damn damn damn. And this is weekly crunch time for one of the magazines I design.

Well, while it installs, I can take a well-earned break, I suppose.

I reinstalled and all is again well. What a lousy, annoying problem.

It's interesting you think it could have to do with the keyboard; I had recently started using an Icelandic keyboard layout preference. I wonder if something got messed up in the switch.

I am especially concerned about this bug because I now think it may have had something to do with the Icelandic keyboard layout. This concerns me because, although I speak English very well and although I am very much a member of the modern world, I am concerned when I find that Icelandic is spoken by so few. I don't want an Íslenska-specific bug! I don't want to be ignored because I'm in the minority! I don't want Icelandic to die!