Started my laptop this morning and none of my applications work.

Using Mint 14.

My gadgets work fine, but as soon as I press just about anything, including the K 'start' button or even terminal, it freezes and I have to power it off with the button on my laptop.

I made no changes to the machine at all. Just turned it off yesterday and now it's fubar.

I created a new user profile and everything works FINE in it so it must be something in my current user profile.

I need to figure out what is going on with my user profile and fix it (I've read it might be a .config file or the cache???)

Sadly I cannot just create a new user profile and copy the (important) contents over because there is not enough HD space.

I have already tried:

a) Opening recovery console and repaired broken packages
b) Opening recovery console and selecting Check all file systems

I haven't found any useful information online as not a lot of people have experienced this problem it seems.

Any help would be appreciated,

Cheers,

rngdmstr

things to try:

look towards the end of file ~/.xsession-errors see if something looks relevant

with your session not running remove /var/tmp/kdecache-user_name this will clear your KDE cache

within KDE run: kbuildsycoca4 --noincremental 2> /dev/null

disable composting alt+shift+F12

as a last resort you can try renaming ~/.kde[4] your data should be fine but all your KDE setting will be reset to the defaults

Do you have access to another system? If so, try connecting via SSH, and monitoring it using htop or another similar application to see what memory usage and disk activity is taking place. Of particular interest is if the system is still responding via SSH even once the physical console itself appears to be hung.

Disabling compositing would also be a good idea as a test.