Thank you very much for your advice - I restored the ipad and it is working fine again now. The problem seems to have been the incompatibility of a number of apps with ios 7.1. -- when reloading applications I got a message that over seventy of my apps would not be reloaded because of "error messages.". After the restore, I loaded several more programs, and when the problems started again deleted until the problems went away, Specifically, the apps in conflict seem to be apps called notebooks (version 6), and puffin....and perhaps one or two others.