Let's see, I am using Mint 8 Helena x64 on my system. When I rebooted, I came to the log in menu, and signed in. The two little dots twirl around for a minute then the terminal open up in the top left corner of the screen and that is it.
I can type in commands, and can get docky to open, or conky. Probably can get more opened but don't know the commands to use to open them. When conky opens it open in the position it is programmed to do from it's config file. In the terminal window that I start it from, it goes through it's programming and has errors that shouldn't be errors like, borders = and it gives an error stating that there is no such thing.
When I try to open anything else with conky open it will not work. I have to ctrl-c to get out of conky then I can open something else. So I opened docky. It opened where it was supposed to with the correct icons, etc. I could open any of the programs I had icons showing on the docky bars. I opened up firefox and was able to get online, but it had no title bar. I then clicked the terminal and opened up an instance of it. It opened on the top left directly on top of firefox. It had no title bar either. I was unable to type in this terminal as the keyboard would not work in it. I finally closed it and then closed firefox, the original terminal was still there without a prompt. I had to close docky down to use it again.
**********************************************************************Edit****************************************************************************
I have noticed when I click on my userid that on the bottom of the screen is a taskbar with three options showing. One is, I believe language, the second is keyboard(?) and the third is what you want to log into. I only have two choices. Window Maker and xterm. GNOME and Failsafe GNOME are not present. I was able to log into Window Maker and check several things out, but I have no idea where to re-add those two options back onto my login screen.
I was also able to get into the Updater while in Window Maker. Today, I had several updates that were installed. Maybe something in there messed it up? But how would I know what to remove and go back to an older version of? And how would I go back? I was under the impression that you were able to do so using the Update manager but that is not the case. At least not in Window Maker.
Also, just so you know, this has now turned into a learning experience for me. I installed Mint 8 x64 again on another partition. The one I had set aside for some other Linux distro, but now which has become my main login. I want to fix the old install though so I know what I did and how to fix it next time. So please, any help or suggestions or ideas would be appreciated.
********************************************************************End Edit************************************************************************
I can tell you it has nothing to do with hardware as I am able to get into both of my Windows installs. Not that I have been in the much since I installed Mint!
Any ideas would be appreciated as I am using the liveCD right now. BTW, I am still a newbie when it comes to Linux although I have learned quite a bit over the past...forget how long I have had it installed! I think it's been three weeks or so. Heck I just installed it on my laptop in a dual boot with XP because I am so impressed with it! Now I just have to figure out what I did to mess it up!
Steve