[bdude]

Sometimes when I try to launch programs they bounce for a bit but then dissapear, is there a reason why this happens?

[Simon]

I've seen that happen before on a colleague's Mac. It turned out he had deleted some OS X installed apps by mistake. He copied them back from a backup, but after that the apps had the wrong owner/priveledges and failed to start properly. As soon as the permissions were fixed everything was back OK.

No idea if that's what's causing your issues, but I'd try repairing permissions first.

[bdude]

Not to sound nooby, but how do you repair permissions?

[Simon]

/Applications/Utilities/DiskUtility -> select your partition -> hit 'Repair Disk Permissions'

[Macola]

If these apps are PowerPC apps and you're using an Intel Mac, it could be a Rosetta bug. Restarting the Mac will fix it.

[mfbernstein]

Means the app is crashing on startup. Variety of possible explanations. Which apps? Which Mac? Which OS? Sometimes, if you launch the app via the terminal, you'll get a helpful error message indicating exactly what went wrong.

[Simon]

And see of the app gives you console errors that might tell you what's going on.

/Applications/Utilities/Console