How do I restore Unity configuration (and other problems) after hard reboot?

Question

I'm running Ubuntu 14.04. It locked up on me, and I did a hard reboot. (I had to reboot by physically holding down the power button.) What happens now, is my wallpaper, my icons in the Launcher, my theme -- it is all gone.

I am also missing stuff in my Launcher that was there, and there are icons there that I didn't have there before (or that I had removed when I started customizing). I am back to the default Unity theme.

But it's more than just a missing theme. As I say, the items I had in my Launcher are missing too. Some of these are a real problem because I installed them through the Software Center, and so I do not know the Terminal command for them. And customizations like auto-hiding the launcher are gone, too. International keyboards that I had installed are gone.

And there is one more piece of weirdness. In the login screen, I have my wallpaper, custom icons, etc. (but not the keyboards). Once I log in, then it there are the problems that I have described.

I am open for any suggestions on how to resolve this.

Here are the contents of some the relevant logs:

$ ls -ld ~/.xsession-errors{,.old} ~/.config
drwx------ 1 grace grace 1064 Dec 28 23:10 /home/grace/.config
-rw------- 1 grace grace  835 Feb  2 15:35 /home/grace/.xsession-errors
-rw------- 1 grace grace  638 Feb  2  2017 /home/grace/.xsession-errors.old

$ more .xsession-errors.old
Script for ibus started at run_im.
init: at-spi2-registryd main process ended, respawning
init: at-spi2-registryd main process ended, respawning
init: at-spi2-registryd main process ended, respawning
init: at-spi2-registryd main process ended, respawning
init: at-spi2-registryd main process ended, respawning
init: at-spi2-registryd main process ended, respawning
init: at-spi2-registryd main process ended, respawning
init: at-spi2-registryd main process ended, respawning
init: at-spi2-registryd main process ended, respawning
init: at-spi2-registryd main process ended, respawning
init: at-spi2-registryd respawning too fast, stopped

$ ls -lR ~/.config/unity
/home/grace/.config/unity:
total 0
-rw-rw-r-- 1 grace grace 0 Jan 13  2015 first_run.stamp

The file .xsession-errors is empty.

It was suggested to me by another user to include links to more of my log files (in /var/log), in case they are relevant. Here they are:

• Xorg.0.log
• Xorg.0.log.old
• Xorg.1.log
• Xorg.1.log.old
• syslog
• dmesg
• kern.log

Answer 1

As you said in chat that this does not happen in the guest account, use the following steps to circumvent the issue: (this is a workaround, not a solution)

• create a new user (E.g. user2 for original user user)
• with the same groups as the other user. (go to a terminal and execute groups to verify logged on to each user and that they have the same output)

Now:

1. open the file manager
2. browse to the /home/user directory
3. copy (not move!) all the files and directories from Downloads to /home/user2/Downloads
4. check you did a good job.
5. Now delete /home/user/Downloads
6. Go back to step 3 and repeat for Documents, Videos, ...
7. In a terminal type the following command: deluser user --remove-home

Done!

Why? As you have seriously messed up some problems with the current's user profile, some setting somewhere in one of the .config files or directory permissions is causing a problem. As we can't solve this problem in a reasonable amount of time, it's best to just leave that profile behind and starting afresh!

Answer 2

I suspect that the ~/.config/dconf/user file was corrupted. You can test that theory by renaming the file to e.g. user.old, log out and then log in again, and see if that measure affects the possibilities to change the settings.

If that fails, reboot before trying anything else...