Hi, I am running KDE Linux Mint 13 on my mom's computer. She has a gateway desktop that runs great, no problems with Linux KDE.
She told me it's been running slow lately so I told her about Mate desktop may be a little faster. I remotely connected to her computer and installed it using the terminal.
I logged off and had her to select it and log back in. I noticed when I got connected, the icons weren't there and it was a mess. I tried different commands to fix them by looking up the correct commands like --fix-missing etc.
It still wasn't working so I typed sudo -xkill all or something like that. I lost connection so I asked her to reboot the machine.
Now it's doing nothing but going to a blank screen with a cursor. ctl alt del doesn't work. so she has to manually reboot it.
Now it's just looping to that same screen everytime she reboots because it's set to log in automatically!
Now I have no ideal what to do, we've been trying different things for the last 5 hours. please help.
All I want to do is get to back to the log in screen and the problem will be resolve just by selecting the default desktop!

When you boot up the computer, a bootloader menu should appear shortly after the initial BIOS messages. In that menu there should be an option "recovery mode" or similar. Selecting it will start Linux in single user mode (no graphics, no networking). You'll get a shell that will allow you to fix the login problem: either remove MATE with "apt-get remove" or find the config file where you can change the autologin setting.

Hope that helps!

You may find the file that contains the log-in options at /etc/kde/kdm/kdmrc or /etc/kdm/kdmrc or some such place. Does Ctrl-Alt-F2 not work? It would be easier to fix things from there than from the rescue mode.

LOL, but I hit ctrl-alt-f2 on my linux and I had to restart the computer to get ot of it. so that wouldn't have been a good ideal considering I'm walking my mom through everything over the phone. She is in another state so going to her house isn't possible.
Anyway she found one of my old cd that has ZorinOS 6 on it. She installed it this morning and is now installing all the updates (over 600) in the hopes that it will work and I can recover her files on the Mint for she installed it on another partition. If I need any help I will ask here. thank you so much for your help.
so I have to ask, if something happens and I have to use ctrl-alt-f2, how do I get out of it?