Dashboard Not Working Correctly on my Apple Localhost

I just installed WordPress on my Apple, as a test site, and the Dashboard looks as if it is incorrectly formatted; in addition, the visual links don’t work at all (this last may be a problem with 3.5).

Even though the Dashboard page has “two columns” checked, there is only one column –no left hand menu column. If you click a topic from the top outline, you have to scroll way down to get to the topic. It looks almost as if the CSS formatting has not been applied.

The only plug-ins I have were the ones included in the WordPress five-minute installation.

Also, some of the functions don’t seem to work, but it is hard to tell, given the state of the page.