Can't get past sign-in screen, after BleachBit run

[kubicle]

Via a Dolphin terminal screen, I've navigated where I see and recognize the root of /home/tomc/, my user acct on the hard drive. I'm now looking at this:

kubuntu@kubuntu: /media/kubuntu/564163e2-8103-4905-91c3-9d504fe5b5ba/C/ ls -la | grep root                                                
drwxr-xr-x  5 root root  4096 Apr  7 19:09 ..

Doesn't look like there is anything in the homeroot that belongs to root so that is probably not the issue the ".." refers to parent directory, so that belonging to root is normal.

I'd suggest the following:
1. check that the filesystem is not full, you can get the list with "df -H", identify your home partition device (/dev/sda4), and see the usage%

2. If the disk is not full, you can chown the home filesystem to tomc just in case there are root owned files in the subdirs:
"sudo chown -R tomc:tomc /path/to/your/home/partition/root"
(replace the "/path/to/your/home/partition/root" with the actual path to your home filesystem /media/kubuntu/etc.
Scratch that, that'll probably not work from the livecd, since there is no user tomc on the live media, you could replace tomc:tomc with 1000:1000 if tomc's userid is 1000, but it would less error prone and safer to run the commands in recovery mode:
1. mount /home
2. chown -R tomc:tomc /home/tomc

[tomcloyd]

Thanks for all the help - fast, and late at night. I very much appreciate having that,and learned some useful ideas.

Due to the reality of my time constraints, I've had to abandon my rescue efforts (which well might have failed anyway, since it was clear what the problem was, much less that it could be fixed), and just reloaded the OS, for a fresh start.

Lesson learned: stay away from any part of BleachBit that is flagged "experimental"!