Hacked, Cracked and Jacked?

hiya folks, I reckon my current situation is worthy of discussion, it's not that i wish to ask a specific question rather to explain whats up with my imac internal hard drive. at the moment everything appears to be working well however that was not the case a long 12 hours ago, back then i had completed a session where i had managed to record a music stream from an itunes internet radio station, to enable the successful recording of stream i first had to download and utilize audacity and soundflower, right? so job done i click on hard drive window to turn off specific programs and thats when i noticed that screen icons were not responding to mouse clicks, whaaat? then icons disappeared from hard drive window, tried to locate programs through finder and received message "cannot locate volumes" or similar, then when i tried to use items in the blue apple menu again no response from "about this mac","recent items","forced quit","restart","shut down" buttons were mute upon clicking, hmmm i tried all i could for 3,4 hours and opted to go for reinstall of OSX 1, i put the startup disk into the drive and guess what?..... nothing happens!tried it 3 times and nish nada niente nothing, finally i turned off the computer with the rear power button, now here is the interesting part, upon turning the computer back on i quickly inserted the OSX 1 disk...this time the disc icon came on screen and the chance to install but hey hang on, now upon checking things seem to be suddenly automatically back to normal functionality, so if there is a question to be asked here i think it would be do you think my problems arose from malicious code, system malfunction or what? if the cause was viral then there may be all manner of nasties lurking in the background, watching..waiting. so a reinstall looks very likely indeed. what do you think folks?