I tried to upgrade and it killed my install

[Ben Novack]

I've been having problems getting my USB key to mount, and I need
packages off of it to get online at my dorm. I was advised to update
and try again, as certain automount-related packages had been
upgraded. A friend of mine let me connect to his cable modem, so I
went into Synaptic, and fired off a full upgrade of all of my
installed packages...

Then I logged out, logged back in, and I found myself at a blank
wallpaper with a mouse cursor and nothing else. Neither left nor right
clicking anywhere had no effect. I went into the terminal and
rebooted, but found the same upon starting up again.

Any ideas? I was thinking of doing a scratch-and-rebuild anyway with a
daily build...

---BHN