Can't log in after changing appearance settings

[oldmankit]

Hello,

I've got quite a weird problem. For the first time ever I tried 'emerald --replace' which didn't seem to work that well, it started going really slow, and then I think I typed 'metacity --replace', but I'm not sure (it didn't find it's way into bash history). The system locked up pretty badly, so I restarted.

When I try to log in to gnome, or even fail safe terminal, there is a fairly long pause, the screen goes blank and shows some errors I can't read quickly enough, and then back to the login screen. So I can't log in.

The funny thing is that there is another user on this machine and she can log-in fine. From that user I can even log in to the problematic account in the bash terminal (exec sudo login -p). It's not a password problem, for sure. However, I cannot genuinely log-in as this problematic user.

I've restarted the computer a few times to no avail.

Why would I be unable to login in the fail safe terminal, when I can log in to this this user in a bash session using a different user's account? What logs / configuration files should I be looking at?

Any suggestions? Thank you.

[oldmankit]

Update:

After logging in to the bash terminal as user 'kit' (the one that isn't working), I tried to open thunderbird from the terminal. The following error came up:


kit@kit-laptop:~$ No protocol specified

(thunderbird-bin:26904): Gtk-WARNING **: cannot open display: :0.0
I can successfully open thunderbird using the alternate user. Does this help?

I also tried the following:

kit@kit-laptop:~$ metacity --replace
No protocol specified
Window manager error: Unable to open X display :0.0

[oldmankit]

Solved. It had nothing to do with changing the appearance settings. The problem was, I was using ecryptfs (according to Bodhizazen's tutorial http://bodhizazen.net/Tutorials/Ecryptfs/). I wanted to remove the Private folder, and didn't do it the 'proper' way (see https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EncryptedPrivateDirectory).

As far as I can remember, I just unmounted the Private folder, then deleted it and the .Private folder, and removed 'auto-mount' from ~/.ecryptfs. Whatever I did, it stopped me logging in again.

To solve the problem, I re-created ~/Private and ~/.Private, re-mounted the encrypted folder (see Bodhizazen's tutorial) and then created auto-mount again. Then I could log-in fine.