Can't Drag & Drop, Missing Spotlight Problem with Mac OS X Leopard - Resolved!

Couple of days back I realised that I couldn't locate my Spotlight icon on the top right hand corner...and at the same time couldn't drag or move any files on my mac desktop (running OS X Leopard 10.5.8)...

and I also couldn't connect to my shared folders...

The immediately action would be to repair the "disk permission" using the Disk Utility & restart my macbook thereafter. Unfortunately, that didn't resolve my problem.

Following next is the decision to either
1)      re-install OS X 10.5 (Leopard) or

2)      upgrade to OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard).

I chose the latter. It seems to have immediately solve the inability to Drag & Drop & the missing Spotlight icon.

But I somewhat experience occasional hanging of iLife '09 apps like iPhoto & iMovie...

For now there's too many important video clips at stake (to edit) for me to re-install the iLife '09. I guess I'll have to wait till I finish editing them first before I really look into the iLife apps...