What version of knoppix are you using, the moderators always ask that, posting that information will increase the probability that they or some of the other more experienced users will be able to find out what is wrong and help you. One problem that through skimming through the forums, I have seen reoccur for people is that the iso they burned their knoppix disk with was bad, or they burned it too fast and the disk itself is bad, try reburning the iso at a slower speed in your burner, also, to see if the OS is kicking out some error messages that it is not transmitting in the form of nicely formatted message boxes, try opening one of the programs that is giving you a problem from the terminal and see if it spits out any error messages in there, unless of course you can't open the terminal either, then I would say try reburning it, or reburning it with another download of the iso, hopefully some of the more knowledgable members here can help you out better than I can, but I hope my reply was somewhat helpful