Knoppix programs are hit or miss in system recovery effort.

New user to Knoppix doing (you guessed it) system recovery and I have a couple questions. What is it with certain applications like konsole and iceweasel acting like they're going to open, only to disappear after a few spins of the hourglass. Likewise, trying to use WINE has been frustrating as I can't get past the base setup. Commands like testdisk won't work either, giving an "error while loading shared library. Since konsole won't work I am using Xterm as a terminal window. Lots of other stuff works as well, I've been able to use openoffice and konqueror, but windows will close unexpectedly in konqueror when I go to sites like webmail and sometimes sites that had worked previously. The cause of my XP crash was updating an intel storage driver, which I'm hoping to resolve with the registry editor in WINE. I've already tried a few things with the windows recovery disk like fixboot and fixmbr to no avail, the system is stuck in a boot menu loop where it restarts the computer no matter what option is selected. Any advice on any of these topics would be appreciated.

Two possibilities:

1) You may have a bad CD-R disk or cannot read it correctly all of the time maybe due to dma issues.
You can try a boot command like this to avoid DMA (the CDROM drive will be slower, but it might work)

knoppix nodma

Another option is to try and check the contents of the CD-R disk:

knoppix testcd

2) You may be running out of free memory, which causes some strange behavior like you have described.
Try to limit the number of programs that are running at the same time, or try a less memory-hungry window manage like XFCE or fluxbox. Boot command:

knoppix desktop=fluxbox (Right-Click on the empty desktop to bring up the "Start" menu)

knoppix desktop=xfce

good luck