UNR - Black screen and cursor after login

AAO with 160GB hard drive, dual-booting XP Home and UNR 9.04. Everything working fine until sometime last week. I'm not sure what exactly brought on the problem, but I had just installed updates before things broke.

Starting up UNR, everything loads normally up to the login screen. After login, I get nothing but a mouse cursor and a black background. Alt-F2 does not bring up the box to run a program. I can Ctl-Alt-Fkey to switch to the alternate consoles, and they seem to work fine.

If I select the "Failsafe Gnome" session from the login screen, the failsafe session loads normally. Here's what I've tried so far:

Since the problem started after installing updates, I thought it might be a mis-applied update. I used Aptitude in text mode to bring all packages up to date. This didn't fix anything.

Googling the problem, I found several mentions of similar problems fixed by running "sudo dpkg --configure -a" but that hasn't helped either.

I also figured that it might be a problem with xorg.conf, so I renamed it and let it be re-generated, but that hasn't made any difference. I also found several mentions of people experiencing this problem because of Compiz. I know Compiz doesn't play well with UNR, so I thought if it had gotten enabled somehow it might be behind my problem. I removed the Compiz packages, but that didn't work either.

Since the failsafe session works, I'm thinking the problem lies either with my user's Gnome configuration, or with the video drivers, but I'm not sure where to go from there. Anyone have any ideas? I can post up any log files or config files you need.

 

More info on this problem:

I created a test account and logged in using that account. Everything is normal with the test account.

Apparently, nothing is wrong with the xorg configuration, it's simply a user settings issue. I'm guessing the problem is either with gnome or the netbook launcher.

I did try renaming all the .gnome* files to old.gnome*, but I still had the same old black screen, white mouse cursor.

Can anyone help point me in the right direction?

 

The blunt tool approach would be to reinstall Ubuntu. This would fix the problem, but you wouldn't know what caused it.

 

Found the problem - it was actually an issue with pulse audio. Ended up fixing it by copying the .pulse directory over from the test account I had created.