Unresponsive desktop - but only for existing user profile (16.04)

Support & Help Requests
1

My default user profile has a non-functional desktop environment, but guest users have almost no problems.

-top and bottom panels are grey blanks and completely unresponsive
-the mouse works fine, even giving a context menu appropriately, even though no options work
-desktop icons are present, but unresponsive to anything other than highlighting by selection
-second monitor is no longer detected, icons in that potion of the desktop no longer accessible

Up to the login screen, everything in fine. After logging in to my profile, tty terminals are essentially the only thing that works. I tried reinstalling and reconfiguring the mate desktop, lightdm, maro, compiz, with no improvement.

I believe the originating event is when I killed an unresponsive caja. Filesystem browser windows wouldn’t open after that, and the next reboot had the issues.

Does anyone know what is going on here?

2

Can't tell you what happen, just went through this with someone else.

3

Looks like a similar issue, but there wasn’t an actual fix listed. My issue is also worse in that trying to run anything with alt-F2 is also impossible, as the command doesn’t work. I have nothing but tty terminals.

4

No real fix, but a work-a-round by creating a new user.

Since you can't pull up a GUI, use the console.

###Edit:

Anything in your Home directory owned by root?