edit image trouble

My problem is 2 fold and I believe they are most likely related. I was rearranging my app actions in firefox 22 and I lost not only my iphoto but my printer has gone bonkers. Iphoto dissapeared from the dock first then iphoto app refused to open,it only flashed. It came back to the dock once but it flashed there also. My printer was in the middle of a very big job and still had 38 pages to go when it went loopy. It said it was printing but nothing came out of it's mouth. Tried to get into print queue but it refused to open the actual queue. Searched extensively through all help I could find, Apple, iphoto, firefox, on line etc but no joy. Then iphoto app came back but not in the dock and I got through to the events, I had thumbnails at top of window, unfortunately, when I tried to edit them none of the photos would come down to the edit window. They will light up as a thumbprint but are still stuck up there at the top. Printer is still going loopy, if I switch it on, it acts like it's working but produces nothing. Tried to open idisc to see if I could do anything about it there but it said firefox would not open it. I tried so many things but the inevitable rainbow ball appears at every stage. Cannot force quit so just shut down then have to safe log in to get rid of the ball. I did reinstall the program along with the apps it came with. I'm obviously not computer savvy and I am sure I messed things up myself,but if anyone can give me a way to go from here, preferably in lay terms, that would be great. I just noticed that it's stopped spell checking my words too....sigh...

I have a MAC 10.6.8 with snow leopard and FF 22. Thanks in advance for any help.