i am running ubuntu 10.10 on an aspire 5734z laptop, as 11.04 has a backlight issue, and i am dual booting with win7, which i am currently on. i have/had KDE, xfce, desktop edition ubuntu, and gnome 3 sessions installed.

i had noticed recently that startup is taking longer than usual, 2x the time as win7, ubuntu and windows are both 32 bit bytheway. after grub, it would be a black screen with only '_' displayed, followed by a screen that says something about sql stuff. i figured this could be the reason my startups were long, and as i dont use sql (that i know of) i decided to just remove it and hope that would fix the problem... yeah, im a linux-noob. i went to software center, searched for it and removed the first entry, and it said it would remove some other stuff, mostly sql named things, plus shotwell and evolution, which i also dont use. after it went thru applying changes, i selected the next one on the list for removal, and the software center froze. i logged out of the gnome3 part, and logged into ubuntu desktop edition. i then only saw a wallpaper, both of the default panels were gone.

at this point i decided a reset was in order. i logged back into the default ubuntu desktop edition part, and the panels were still missing. i figured i would login to gnome3 or kde and see if i could get something figured out from there, but they are missing from the drop down box. the only ones remaining are ubuntu (desktop, recovery and safemode) and xcfe. i logged into xcfe only to find out firefox is gone. i am not familiar with xcfe, i only added it to maybe use sometime when i need to extend battery time, and with no click here to get online - icon in the panel, i figured my best bet was to return to windows and plead for help, before i tried to 'fix' something else, and made an even bigger mess.

i dont know what i couldve done to basically render my ubuntu useless to me, to get rid of my panels, firefox, and i dont even know what else.. but the only thing i did at all was to remove the top sql entry, which was something like sql3_lib or something like that. anyone that can help me would be greatly appreciated. thanks in advance.