[SOLVED] I've killed my desktop!

[mittfh]

While attempting various strategies to convince Mageia 2, Xfce and Compiz (with gtk-window-decorator rather than compiz's preferred [fictitious?] "compiz-window-decorator") to play together nicely, I've somehow ended up with a system that can boot up to the login screen OK, but once I've logged in I'm presented with a blank desktop - with just the default Mageia wallpaper and a cursor that can move around the screen but not do anything else. Removing the entry for compiz from autostart and using Drak3d to disable 3D effects hasn't had any effect either. I even went as far as installing task-gnome-minimal, but trying to go into that results in a blank blue screen - so that hasn't solved anything either!

Dmesg doesn't reveal anything useful (its last update was when gdm started), neither does Xorg.0.log (which seems to be mainly filled with entries describing the screen resolutions / colour depths the graphics card can support).

[EDIT] Solved by renaming ~/.config - I also removed most of Gnome and installed Slim for my login manager.

[Germ]

Glad you got it sorted.

[doktor5000]

Hard to say what you did, if you don't remember how can we? Only if you did it in a terminal, there's a history for that.
Dmesg gives mostly kernel related logging stuff, and Xorg.0.log gives the log for the X server, which both won't help you.
Maybe have a look at the end of /home/username/.xsession-errors

Also an option may be to create a new user and check if the problem persists with that one

[mittfh]

The original post included the relevant sections of /var/log/messages in case that helped and a query if any other logs would be useful to print. Since I grew impatient and experimented with something that did fix it (evidently the error was in my .config folder somewhere), I scrubbed the log when editing the post to say I'd resolved it.