since i suck at linux, one day i was logging in and i saw a cool-looking blue button with a man in the middle of it. turns out it was the assisstive technologies thing. one of them was magnifier, and i was thinking of windows and thought it would zoom just where the cursor was. yea, NO. now its stuck on the right side of the login screen, and its really annoying. i would turn it off, but the magnifier takes up the space where the blue button was, so its stuck. i was also gonna try logging in on failsafe GNOME, but guess what, it takes up the space for that, too! so now im stuck. can someone please help me?

Welcome to LQ.

When asking for help, it would be a great help (since there are so many GNU/Linux distros) to tell us which one you are using. I use OpenSuse, and the blue button you mention is not on my login screen. Other people will probably have the same problem I have. I can't help without more info from you.

im using linux mint 8 helena

OK. A quick at Mint tells me you have MintTools to administer your system. Once logged in, can you open a terminal and run mintdesktop (I'm not certain if that is all lower case, or MintDesktop). If you can run mintdesktop from the command line, you should be able to re-configure your desktop.

thanks but all I see is:

(under desktop items tab)

*Computer
*Home
*Network
*Trash
*Mounted Volumes

(under gnome compositing tab)

*Gnome Compositing

the * means a check box


Network and Gnome Compositing are unchecked.