Applications Disappearing

are the icons gone off the desktop? if you allow it to, windows will put "unused" icons from the desktop into an unused icons folder on the desktop to reduce clutter.

If that is not it, your start menu will also modiy itself to not show menu entries that are not recently used. If it has done that there will be a small double arrow giving you a hint that there is more to be seen at the bottom of the menu. click on it and the entire menu will appear. selecting one of the missing programs will resore it back to the short list of programs.

If the executables to these applications are missing then you have a real problem.

It is definitly not unused icons. My Norton just dissappeared. My paint shows but as one of those blank boxes. Same with paint. I think I have a worm but where would I start getting rid of that??

Just a question: what happens if you explore to, for example, C:\Program Files\Norton Antivirus and try to double-click on the exe file? Does it launch?

As described above. The question is do the actual files (exe) dissappear or just links?

If it is the first then I would guess it is some sort of malicous soft. Run updated antivirus plus spybot or similiar.
:)