This happened to me yesterday when machine would'nt shut down (probably skype) and I impatiently just powered off in the end.

On rebooting, the login backgrounds etc were all black.

1. Did my impatience do this? Have done this before though

2. Is it related to hack that happened a week ago, that I thought
repartitioning,formatting etc should have fixed?

3. Is this a new color scheme for kubuntu edgy?

Anyone else out there have this happen?

Have you run a fsck ???.

Yes have backups but not sure what files need to be restored. I did actually restore a full backup when this happened but this did not help, also found a bomb icon and file called core which is a crash dump file.

I thought of doing this - as well on booting there are problems with mounting hard drives, have to hit Cntrl and D to continue booting. BUT my drives are all ext3 and if I run fsck I get a warning about stuffing things up even more! Also tried out i810 deb video driver which I believe I have now completely removed, but problem remains.

Cheers