I upgraded my Ubuntu 10.10 to 11.04 using the little pop-up "DO YOU WANT TO UPGRADE?" box, but now when I log into my Gnome desktop, the desktop files load (drives/random picture/etc) but the actual GUI doesn't load.
There's not menu bar/tray etc
The hotkeys for switching desktops still work, CRTL + ALT + F1 works, and I can create shortcuts - but that's it.
Anyone know how to fix it?
I installed KDE as a backup awhile back, but I really would prefer to have GNOME back :/
Sounds like you need to reset your GNOME configuration - if you're using Unity, look at this post, otherwise look at this post.
Oh boy, that's a messy one... I had this issue too. It looks like you have gnome3 ppa, but 11.04 is still gnome2 and gnome3 is kinda not-ready-yet (major issues with rendering on some graphic cards and badly generated default settings) for 11.04 on some systems. Go back to gnome2 (remove gnome3 ppa and bring back ubuntu-desktop package would be the shortest way to do it). If you still have some problems it's probably gnome2 settings are broken.
My fix for this is:
Logout, switch to command line (alt+ctrl+f1), login.
in your /home/ backup those dirs and then remove them (just mv them somewhere):
.gnome .gnome2 .gconf .gconfd .metacity
Switch back to X (alt+ctrl+f7), cry over your lost settings, try to restore them if you have some time to compare default and backup you made in the previous step.
I had similar situation with some wrong compiz settings; try logging from another user, if it helps, you can reset some settings from main profile too.
