Blender Render and Particle Problem

It seems like Blender just has not been working well of late. If I create a particle emitter and then try and edit it’s settings the particle settings don’t show up (they are missing). Now today I just did a simple render of a simple plane and this is what I got. Blender was working great just a week ago.

Really troublesome as I can’t pinpoint if it’s a Blender/VideoCard problem or a virus etc.

Any suggestions would really be appreciated.