Alright, so now I feel a little retarded for not having looked back farther on the forums, because I found
this thread quite a few pages back. So, let me apologize quickly to those of you who have pet peeves with people not searching enough before making new threads lol; I tend to get mildly irritated with that as well and I did look through a couple pages of threads...just not enough of them apparantly.
Using the "Open Existing Chat Window..." option by right-clicking my chat window brought up another chat window that apparantly is where all my links have been disappearing to. I was able to move all my tabs from the other "broken" chat window into this window and now the links work. So, the problem itself is solved.
However, I would still appreciate some insight from you computer savvy folks as to what exactly is the deal with these seperate chat windows. I've never opened secondary chat windows and don't have much, if any, clue as to how this even happened. I'd like to be schooled a little bit on this if anyone finds the time.