I found the solution to this problem, albeit belatedly. Like TheByteSmasher, having no luck myself or finding any solution through countless searches, I re-installed. I backed up everything up and left my home directory in place during the re-install. Everything was working fine afterwards. Problem solved. But it seems this may not be necessary.
Upon re-adding all my old PPAs and most of my old software and updating, the problem returned exactly as it was before. This was highly frustrating having spent the weekend backing up and re-installing to solve this problem!
Luckily I was able to backtrack and find out what had been upgraded and I eventually located the culprit:
libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0
Somehow my version of that file had been updated from Utopics stable version libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0:2.30.8-1 to the development version libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0:2.31.1-1
I wasn’t able to downgrade that package but using the following command I was able to locate the PPA that had upgraded this package:
apt-cache policy libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0
This showed me the PPA that package belonged to. I then used PPA Purge to revert all the changes made by that particular PPA
sudo apt-get install ppa-purge
sudo ppa-purge [ppa to be purged]
This reverted all the changes and restored everything back to normal, everything from checkboxes to nautilus working.
I hope this helps someone else as this is a deeply frustrating problem, not able to use the file manager in any useful way is a nightmare, let alone being unable to change theme, open anything that also uses nautilus (startup disk creator would crash on disc image selection, and many others too).
I am not sure whether the solution can be achieved without a re-install, but I would have thought it likely and definitely worth a shot.
Segmentation fault (core dumped)
when I tried to move anything or pressed a key – TheByteSmasher Sep 06 '14 at 17:07