I did Adept update on Kubuntu 7.10 tonight -- rebooted -- desktop is blank!

[O. Sinclair]

roger at rogerchrisman.com wrote:
> Desktop went blank on my other Kubuntu 7.10 computer after routine
> Adept update tonight. After reboot it now has no desktop icons, no
> task bar, no context menu. Nothing but a blue desktop image and a
> white cursor arrow. Rebooting again doesn't fix it. Same for both
> original user desktop and the additional user's desktop I have on that
> computer.
> 
> What happened?
> 
> _What I did
> Tonight I did a routine update on that computer (a six year old AMD
> Athlon i386 ATX with 1G ram and Kubuntu 7.10) via Adept. I didn't look
> at what was updated, just updated everything that was available. It
> had been a couple weeks since the last update. Everything seemed to
> update fine. So I quite Adept and rebooted.
> 
> _Problem
> Now when I boot up that computer and log into either user (I have 2 on
> that box), the KDE "Loading Desktop Settings" seems to stall -- login
> waits at that point for about 30 to 60 seconds, then proceeds to a
> blank desktop with _only_ the blue-and-curved-lines desk image and a
> white cursor arrow. The mouse moves the arrow around but left, right
> and middle click do nothing. No context menu appears. My desktop icons
> are gone. No task bar at all. Alt+F1 does not bring any task bar up,
> either.
> 
> Any ideas what happened?
> 
> How can recover my normal desktop settings and get back to normal on
> that computer?
Not that I know if it will help you but when I updated earlier today I 
noticed that x-server-xorg-core was updated. Maybe your settings in 
xorg.conf went bananas? There is a dpkg reconfigure something for that, 
google around a bit and see if you can find it.

Sinclair