By it affecting two separate application un associated that's a problem in the system.
Try repairing permissions (Disk Utilities in Utility Folder)
Or if you don't have OSX.6 (snow leopard) download & install AppleJack. The start up in Single User Mode (command[apple Key]-s) when cursor comes up do the various in order do items 3 and 4 once for system and once for each user. when all complete, when complete quit and restart computer. Make take a few minutes to start up and even may see blue screen for a few seconds while some system caches are rebuilt. Then Open the affected Applications and see what happens.