Disappearing wallpaper and GNOME Shell not working

[u-noob-tu]

Today I installed Ubuntu 13.04 on a Lenovo ThinkPad X220. It worked fine at first, but after the first round of updates and rebooting it GNOME Shell seems to have been broken. At first I was able to get into GNOME Shell but my wallpaper was gone. I restarted my computer again and this time I could not get into GNOME Shell at all, it just hangs at the login screen. I'm able to get into Unity and it too doesn't display my wallpaper, and sometimes a static image of the login screen will get "stuck" and become the wallpaper. I think my hard drive may be going bad and that may have something to do with it. The whole computer feels kinda sluggish and the hard drive is quite noisy.

[neu5eeCh]

This doesn't help, but I recently installed Ubuntu Gnome 13.04 and noticed a similar problem. Gnome Shell randomly decided it couldn't use certain wallpapers? -- even those with which it shipped. There's a nasty bug somewhere. Unfortunately, I decided I still didn't like Gnome Shell and that it wasn't worth my time to sort it all out. My solution to this bug was to install Elementary OS Luna.

[u-noob-tu]

I might just install Xubuntu instead, though I really wanted to use Unity/GNOME Shell because its more usable on smaller screened devices (at least I think it is). XFCE has been my favorite environment for my desktop, though I'm not sure I will like it as much on my Lenovo.

[neu5eeCh]

Xubuntu is also my fav. DE. However, you might consider Luna OS. I was in a similar situation and have decided that Luna works quite well on my Netbook (Acer Aspire). It's very keyboard friendly, and despite being a BETA, is comparatively stable and bug free (much more so, in my experience) than either Unity, Cinnamon or Gnome Shell. It's not all that tweakable, but on a small screen that doesn't bother me. P.S. It's based on 12.04 LTS.