Applications not responding

I have portable apps on my hard drive as well as on my thumb drive. I have kept the thumb drive up-to-date, but have not, actively, used it. IT is possble that it was not used for nearly four weeks. Clawin works fine, but all other apps start up ok, but then stop responding. I was able to get Thunderbird started after updating to v.2.0.0.19 with a new install. But neither Firefox3.0.5, nor OpenOffice went past the basic toolbars, and stopped responding. I had rerun Firefox with no improvement.
Any idea what's going on?
If this issue was discussed before, I did not recognize it. So, be patient, and provide a link.
Thanks.
fp