Instant Karma (was A better flavour?)

[Grizzly]

Almost as soon as I posted "A better flavour" thread I myself had a bit of 
trouble

I have a Compaq laptop that has bare 16.04 on (think 12.04->14.04->16.04) it 
had been sidelined because a Ram modual had died and made it run like cold 
Treacle, anyway I found a spare 128mb stick (so now 768mb some taken by 
display) and did

sudo apt update -y && sudo apt dist-upgrade -y

sudo apt autoremove -y && sudo apt autoclean -y

shutdown now -r

all went well (a bit slow but...)

then I got cocky

sudo Scripts/rm-kernels

listed a large number of old & very old kernels so I clicked on all of them and 
sat back as they were deleted...

untill it got to a few that started 3.x.x.22 thru 3.x.x.28 "Cant be found"

no problemm but

dpkg --list | grep linux-image

still showed them

so I tried rm-kernels again same response 

then I did a manual

rm -rf of all the 3.x.x.* kernels

reboot

Wallpaper only no launcher or top panel, left for 20 minutes

could not get a terminal (Ctrl+Shift+T) to let me shutdown, so had to power 
down

Reboot - Advanced - Recovery - Resume

All working ;->)

Reboot 

back to just wallpaper

Reboot - Advanced - Recover - Resume

Working again

--reinstall desktop & unity

no change on reboot

rinse and repeate

So ok bad Karma, but why  

Advanced - Recover - Resume (latest kernel)
works (so everything needed is there?)

and Normal Boot to same Kernel? does not

what "should" I have done?

Probably not what I did do