Icons & desktop font color went to garbage

[User-42]

- LMDE 201303 x86
installed on
Asus EeePC R101D-EU17-BK (netbook)
- Intel Atom N455 1.66GHz
- 160GB
- SDA1 40GB EXT3

first off I'm not retarded,
I've been around since DOS 3.x walked through all the windows versions from win 3.1 to win7 (tried win 8 and it's garbage)
and never had this type of problem where there is no clear setting to change to get back what you had last time you shut down

I rescued this machine from the trash as the only thing that was wrong with it,
was the previous owner trashed the HDD and it was so bad that I couldn't even clone the recovery partition to a new HDD
which I have successfully done with other systems failing HDDs

I installed a new 160GB HDD created a 40GB partition and decided to see if LMDE would run on it

when I first install everything seems fine
the desktop icons make sense, the font is a readable colour
and the menu icons are standard looking buttons
eg.
- the power button is a pic of a PC power button that goes to the suspend / restart / shutdown dialog

when I power up today, it's a pic of a light switch, the desktop font is black and unreadable and the icons have changed
- I don't want those buttons / icons or that colour font

this has happened before and the only way I could find to resolve it was to do fresh install as none of the settings seemed to be able to change it

now this is the second time this happened and I'm furious that there is no clear indication as to what settings control this garbage

[User-42]

nope;

dicked around in settings all over the thing and nothing changed it back
now have to re-install again

I have never had to re-install windows due to this type of issue

[User-42]

fresh install
booted once

next boot same garbage

icons changed & screen font colour changed

where & why is this happening ?

I cannot read black font on black wallpaper

[caf4926]

I recommend you try Mint 13 Mate

[User-42]

Actually I want it to look like it does when booting the live CD mode

it ran like that for all of May - July
then I had the problem first time in Aug. started up one day and all was garbage

did fresh install because I couldn't find out where to change it back
and it worked fine until the day before the first post

now every fresh install does the same thing
- can't even get one restart and it all goes to garbage
there is some dialog that once opened hoses the system

[brobriobri]

I am having the same issue with the font color of the desktop icons. Just installed Linux Mint 15 XFCE, and the font color of the desktop icons is black. I don't know what desktop manager the Mint XFCE version is using, but I have found the desktop manager in Settings. It does have options for resizing the icons, and such, but nothing there for changed the icons font color. The only workaround that I can think of is to install a different desktop manager? Any input on this would be appreciated.