Well... here's how I fixed it: I copied my data to my hard drive and did a HARD RESET and wiped the sucker. The only thing I lost were my TASKS, CALENDAR and CONTACTS (which was minimal at this time). Got all my notes and other goodies back.
Apparently, some program I installed seriously interferred with a lot of things on the PDA. I can't be absolutely sure, but I believe it was MICROSOFT READER that was the ill-behaved program.
The reason I think this is because my TAHOMA font was missing, and four other fonts were in its place (I can't remember the specific names). When I tried to delete Microsoft Reader... it said those four fonts could not be erased and refused to delete the program. When I went to File Explorer, apparently these fonts were set to READ ONLY and they COULD NOT be changed from that (since then I've found a better file manager program that works pretty well).
So I pretty much narrowed the problem down to Microsoft Reader. When I did the hard reset, the problem completely disappeared.
If ya want a program to really screw up your computer system, just install a Microsoft product (and yes, that INCLUDES Windows!).