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So I looked up Fairies of the Forest, and the CD looks familiar, and so does some of the game (namely the fairy Pippa), but having watched some gameplay recordings it isn't what I remember unfortunately. Thank you so much for the lead though, this is much closer than I have been for a long time.
Edited by Greenkat82a search yields a similar inquiry
that suggests a game from the same series, Search for the Magic Emeralds: A Fairy Adventure Game

I played this game on my computer (windows 95/98/XP) when I was a child in the early 2000's. I may have got this game as a freebie in a cereal box or something similar, but I can't confirm that. The CD-ROM is long lost, but I never had a proper game case for it, which is why I suspect that.
I remember a fairy in a pink(?) dress led you through the game, and you had to save the forest by finding emeralds. You went through a series of places that were drawings of rooms or fictional places and you had to click all over the picture and sometimes you'd get an emerald. It would sound like a really typical coin dropping in a bag sound each time you found one.
You got about 30 seconds to a minute to find as many emeralds as you could. I vaguely remember a tense "10 seconds!", and then madly clicking as fast as I could all over the screen. I imagine it gave you an emerald randomly for some percentage of clicks, but to my child-mind it felt like they were hidden in particular places, if only I could figure it out.
At the end of the game depending on how many emeralds you found, the forest would grow back, the more emeralds you got over the course of the game the more it would grow.