If you have a working Desktop Environment, you can make a new icon for it for gnome-terminal or xterm. Then modify that icon so that the command it executes is something like this:
Code:
gnome-terminal -x /bin/bash
gnome-terminal -x /bin/sh
The Gnome Terminal should also work with the -x option if you prefer that.
Then you should be able to use Gnome Terminal directly.
If that doesn't work, maybe try ctrl-alt-f1 and switch to a console and use
dconf from there?
Which files did you change manually?