Photoshop Elements 9

Out the Blue, while cleaning up old photos, my CROP Tool has gone South..  When I click on Crop Icon, I get 3 small black lines on the top of the tool as I move to the photo I want to crop.  I had never seen this thing before, it moves in all sorts of ways across the top of the photo, hard to actually crop any photo because this 3 line Crop tool has it's own ideas of what the crop should look like.  It's driving me crazy!  I removed and re-installed PS-9 to no avail.  The 3 black lines on top of the crop tood are still there when I attempt to cleanly crop a photograph.  Thank you for any help.  Do alot of photos for my Blog writing about US Military in Taiwan.