OS3.9 has a similar problem at times.
There's nothing wrong with the resource.library, failure is the result of missing gadget classes that weren't installed for some reason or another.
From your 3.5 CD, manually copy the workbench3.5/classes/gadgets/ contents to your installed classes/gadgets.
If you installed any boingbag updates since then, make sure you reinstall them as the above step will naturally overwrite some of the gadget classes with older versions.