Hello everybody:

I've been using Ubuntu 10.10 without incident since doing a fresh install from Ubuntu 10.04.

That all changed today.

When trying to enter anything in places: Home folder, Files, Downloads, Documents etc. I kept receiving the follow message:

"Could not open location." "No application is registered as handling this file.

"Your windows manager does not support the show desktop button, or you are not running a windows manager."

After doing some research on the topic I decided to un-install Compiz, Configuration Editor, Metacity, Mutter and a few games.

Upon reboot I had lost the top and bottom panels. My cursor had turned into a black X and the message "No system tray detected on this system."

The only thing available is Docky. This is how I'm able to get online to your site.

From research I see that other distros have had this problem going a ways back.

My problem is that I'm at the absolute limits of my Ububtu 10.10 knowledge.

I sincerely hope someone here is familiar with this issue and can recommend a possible fix.

I've never encountered anything like this before.

Please allow me to thank everyone in advance for any help that might allow me to resolve these issues.

Thank you.

It sounds like there is a problem with your window management system. But not being able to open your home folder and stuff from the Places menu sounds like the problem may be much more than your window management system. Uninstalling Compiz and all that stuff wasn't going to save you, of course, but you already found that out. In my personal experience with Compiz (outside of Fedora), when I install it, eventually, Something Is Going To Go Terribly Wrong.

If you don't want to lose your system, then you can try to reinstall Gnome from the Live CD. If that doesn't work, you can install a different desktop environment temporarily using this as a guide:
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Insta...tu-48586.shtml. If the temporary environment works, I believe that it's just that something went wrong with your Gnome installation, and that a reinstallation of it should fix it. On the other hand, if you still have the same issues you are currently having with a new installation of a desktop environment, then there is a deeper, darker problem looming that might require a complete reinstallation.

Alternatively, if you can manage it, you can run a virtual console using VirtualBox and see if a guest account would have the same problems that you are experiencing. Surely, though, you probably don't want to always log in as a guest (I hate it when Fedora tells me it's going to "report" something to the "adminstrator" when I'm sitting right there), but it will help to untangle exactly what is causing the problem.

As for stability of the OS itself, I don't think that this should be the type of thing that has you reinstalling your desktop environment every two weeks or something like that.