I'm new to gentoo so may not understand the way everything works. please forgive me if I screw up things a bit.

I did an emerge --update --deep --world on my system because I had just installed and wanted to update everything. It completed with no obvious errors (when I did emerge --update --pretend --deep --world right after updating it still listed things so I'm not sure if that means that something went wrong or what). So I updated all of the configfiles (by this I mean I just moved the ._cf000_foo.conf or whatever it is to foo.conf. only made some minor changes to my Xorg.conf so I didn't expect there to be any problems with the others.). Now when I boot my computer I'm givin an error saying xdm can't start. So I just log in and run GDM. Gnome starts and gives me an error saying its settings (the exact error is "the ame org.gnome.SettingsDaemon was not provided by any .srvice files"). Could this be because of a Config file or maybe something to do with the way I am running Gnome? Normally I would just reinstall and try again but since this is gentoo and I will have to update in the future I figured I would see if I can fix it.

What did I break and how, if at all, can I fix it?
Any and all help would be very appreciated. Thanks bunches.

Hi,

install gentoolkit and run revdep-rebuild. If you haven't installed xdm, its normal that it doesn't start (just search for it in your portage tree), you should probably modify your /etc/conf.d/xdm.
By hand or using etc-update? if by hand, I suggest checking none have misspelled names.
Another possibility is to sync your tree again and update, again.