This is something of a continuation of a thread that I started and lost over in the software forum, but I think this has morphed into a pretty big newb problem, as it feels like I should be able to solve it, but can't.

Yesterday I more or less killed X. Won't load, period. I can get to a command prompt without issue, and play with command lines there. Drives all mount properly, et alia.

I have no idea how to 'properly' proceed from there, but since I can update X just fine, I figure that it'd be easiest to just go back to an older version and start from scratch. The problem I'm running into is that I can't install an older version of X on top of a newer version, and I can't remove the newer version due to a disgustingly high number of other packages being dependent upon X.

So my new (though not improved) question is: am I even close to a workable solution here, or do I just need to suck it up and reinstall Linux from scratch?

what kind of error(s) are you getting when x tries to start up?? or from the command line "startx"