where is best place to get tiger support/troubleshooting

[faithnotgreed]

thanks so much for any leads
i need some help and am not able to access the mac help menu (when i try to search or hit the "more topics" link it just cycles around and nothing appears)

on edit: i think the worst of this happened after i tried to copy the couple thousand songs that were in the trash onto my desktop

i dont recall exactly what i was doing - something with itunes -when i noticed my itunes icon disappeared from the dock
i thought perhaps i lost my extensive itunes library so without thinking i tried to copy all the songs in my trash to the desktop (in order to retrieve any music - of course not thinking about what was in the trash or why)
i dont know but i think this is when the desktop disappeared

now when i click the cursor on the desktop up pop various files/songs that had been on the desktop so its not that they dont exist but they dont show up on their own
i havent located the harddrive icon yet

i have restarted the computer and still get the same result - nothing on the desktop until i start clicking on it with the cursor and also the itunes icon does not appear until i click on an mp3 and then itunes pops up with my itunes library intact

i have not done anything to the computer such as installing or deleting any program

i have an emac with tiger 10.4

thanks for any suggestions or websites with good and straightforward troubleshooting
i havent had any problems before and so far have not had any luck from a google search
ill keep searching for 10.4 troubleshooting help but so far no luck

[reprobate]

1. I've found pretty good solutions at the apple web site.

Try www.apple.com then click on support and discussions. There are discussion groups for OS X and for iTunes. Hope it helps.

If theres no subject heading that fits your question, just start a new one and ask. I've found the mods and users there to be quite helpful

[faithnotgreed]

2. thank you so much. i will get right to it

[faithnotgreed]

3. thank you again. i got my answer there

it was a corrupt file so after awhile of deleting everything i rebooted and all my icons appeared as they should

thanks again
i was wary of going to apple discussion board because i thought it would be way too much information
but since my problem was specific (and not altogether uncommon) the discussion board search worked like a charm

thank you so much reprobate

[reprobate]

4. You are very welcome. That's what this group is for.

[faithnotgreed]

5. quite true but i wasnt sure when someone would respond

so it was great

except for the part where i tried to manually delete these files (for maybe 45 minutes)
so after i located my hd icon on the desktop i recalled that i could look at what is in the desktop folder
voila - many mp3s + the apparently corrupted files

and i just have to say how much i like your signature line
i dont normally look at those too hard since they are greyed out but im glad i saw yours

heres to all thats right in the world - and to justice one day for all thats wrong

peace friend