Riddle me this, Mac Users!

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Does anyone know what to do with applications that simply won’t start? I click on something in, say, a finder window, the correct icon appears in the dock, bounces two or three times as though it’s going to start up, then shrinks down to nothing.

I have an application that I need to use, and it’s one of the ones that doesn’t works. I don’t even know if it used to work, because I’ve never tried to open it before. FWIW, I’m using a Mac Mini G4 with 1.4 Ghz and 512 MB RAM. The program that won’t open (iCal) came with the computer.

I’ve already tried repairing disk permissions and I’ve reinstalled the bundled software from the installation disk. Am I missing something?