Yikes! I really crashed my Finder...how to recover?

Hi... I used some nifty freeware to try to recover some pics off of a SD card today. It's a fairly simplistic piece of software and I wasn't really thinking when I got it rolling. I pointed it to my Desktop for saving the recovered pics. Well, it put 800 2mb pic files onto my desktop in the course of an hour. I thought, Whups, that'll be a mess. But it's been worse than that! It has crashed my Finder bigtime. I can see my Desktop. But when I move the cursor with my Powerbook G4 trackpad, it turns into the Spinning Wheel every time. For a few seconds. Then it goes back to being a cursor. I can't do anything with the Finder on the Desktop. I restarted in Safe Mode. Same thing. Actually, I got a bit of life right after restarting -- enough to create a new Folder that I planned to drag all those stray desktop files into. It's a new machine for me. It has 1.5ghz, 1gb RAM, I think. Oddly, I can open applications -- they work badly and slowly but they open. And I can drag windows around, even a Finder window will sometimes open and let me drag it around but I can't change folders/directories in it. Help? Thanks! --JP