No, the clock battery appears to be dead. Same as my classic. I will have to deal with that.

I feel like such a fool, thank you, I just loaded the memory control panel and it says 5mb built-in, go up to 11mb restart. Curiously though, as many times as I restart, it never goes above the 5mb anymore. But that solves the disappearing mystery.

Also, as of today, half the time I click the apple and the "about this Macintosh" it crashes, has an "address error" and has to be restarted.