I've been having trouble with my system since upgrading to PCLOS 2009 from 2007. For starters I could only get to the desktop by using the Linux with kernel 2.6.26.8.tex3 while booting up.
The other night I was removing some unused program with Synaptic in PCLOS09. After that my computer will only go to the terminal when it starts. I get the following:
PCLinuxOS release 2009 (PCLinuxOS) for i586
Kernel 2.6.26.8.tex3 on a Dual-processor i686 / tty1
localhost login:

From there I can login as my account or root, however I only see:
[root@localhost ~]#
or [user@localhost ~]$

How do I get back the old desktop?

I believe that this will provide an opportunity for you to see why people take some precautions before making big changes to their operating system. I am specifically talking about making a backup of the system before you make big changes. Partimage can make an image backup of your partition(s) that is easy to restore if things go wrong. Partimage will also automatically store the MBR of your disk if you don't use the bzip2 compression for making the partimage backup file. I always backup the MBR separately using dd but you can usually recover the MBR from the partimage backup file.

Upgrades are almost always more trouble than making a fresh installation. The amount of work and which tasks are required to configure a new installation are known in advance. The problems that are created by upgrading are not known in advance and may require more time to fix than configuring a fresh installation would require.

The PCLOS installer is not very good. I have found that it does not automatically create choices that you would expect to have enabled.

Why? Leave the unused software alone. It isn't doing you any harm. In this case you probably removed libraries that other software required to run.

This would be a good place to use the quote feature of LQ to offset the stuff on the screen from your question. The quote feature makes reading your post easier for us to read.

Use of quotes here would also have been a good idea.

At this point you probably have to boot a live CD, create a new file system on the system partition, and reinstall an operating system.

You could have prevented this from happening if you had made a partimage backup of our system partition before upgrading. If you had a partimage backup on another partition or on another disk you could then use partimage to restore the original system.

Again, taking precautions in advance will create options for you to recover your system if upgrades or reconfiguring your system creates problems.