I'm the kind of guy who likes to make things easy for himself, and I believe I went too far. There was a single directory right under the / directory, but I cannot recall which one at the time, and I switched all of the permissions for this directory to my user ID. Now that I have done this my computer has been running slow and and acting unusual.
Gnome is the biggest problem. As soon as I login, the system starts reporting errors and seemingly blaming these problems on gnome. Is there a simple method to repair this problem without re-installing ubuntu?