My laptop won't let me open my documents?

Whenever I click the documents icon on the taskbar my laptop 'refreshes' as in, the taskbar disappears and reappears like it's been refreshed and then the documents won't open. I can open documents in other ways, by using the folders I have on my desktop but the icon won't work.

Also I just discovered that if I right click any documents in my folders when my documents is open (to copy and paste, for example) the refreshing thing happens again and the folders I have open close automatically. I can live with it, I suppose, but does anyone know why this is happening? Or how to stop it? It started a couple of weeks ago and I don't think I did anything to the laptop to make it happen (it's windows 8 btw).