Updates kill Keyboard and mouse

Question

I had applied all the updates available for on 23rd Morning and Keyboard and mouse stopped working thereafter. The updates amounted to around 230 MBs in size. I can use the keyboard to select other items in Grub menu and it works upto the login prompt. I can change the console to ctrl+alt+F1 to F6 during boot up before the login screen. No response thereafter. I have set the autoloin after 10 Seconds and also the notification asks me for enabling compositing.

Some thread advises me to remove the .gconfd folder of my home. Please advise whether it is safe. I have done some customizations in Ubuntu. will they be lost?

When booted in recovery mode, the screen remains blank without the options like Repair Packages, Root shell, Resume etc. BTW, ctrl+alt+del reboots the blank screen.

What to do now? I thought that Recovery mode boot will give me the menu of these above items.

TIA.

Answer 1

A relatively safe way to test the "something in .gconf doesn't like me" hypothesis is

cd
mv .gconf dot.gconf

where the obvious inverse

mv dot.gconf .gconf

will set things back to the way they were if this doesn't help. Also useful for testing this hypothesis is to adduser a dummy account and see if a fresh user is also so afflicted.

Incidentally .gconfd contains very little information, perhaps you misread the original recommendation?