[Solved] Settings toggles are overlaid with error icons

[ThomasAn]

Over the past few days, I've been chasing little glitches here and there or doing small changes (like setting URL file mime types, fixing some permissions issues relating to lightdm and wallpapers, etc) so somewhere along the line something got knocked off and now the settings dialog toggles are angry.
Changing icon themes just changes the shape of the error icons. So all themes are affected.

Screenshot of settings dialog

Once you recover from laughing, would you happen to have any ideas or leads ?

[spamegg]

so somewhere along the line something got knocked off

Have you written down everything you've done / changed?
Have you made a Timeshift snapshot before messing with things?

You can try right-clicking on the Panel, Troubleshoot, "Restore all settings to default" to see if that helps.

From now on write down everything you change, and make Timeshift snapshots.

[ThomasAn]

It's a good idea for sure. I was going to do a snapshot once I had the system in a good state. In my case (due to the specific hardware) the fresh install didn't quite sit well, so there was no "pure" state worthy of a timehift. It all started with an external monitor as primary connected by default to the hdmi of an Acodot 9-1 usb dock. Mint cannot see it's hdmi out of the box like windows does and sent me on a tailspin for a week. After that, due to nvidia drivers, it would hang on suspend (which it took a few days of tinkering to figure out it wasn't lightdm broken), and so on.

[ThomasAn]

Follow up.

This is solved. It was caused by an index.theme file in ~/.local/share/icons/hicolor