Repair KDE 4.XX botched update?

[boss]

Last night Adept downloaded 60plus updates and apparently crashed. Sleepily, I returned to my trusty Kubuntu PC to shut it down for the night, and saw the error message, which being half asleep I ignored and did a regular shutdown. This morning it was still on but won't let me log in, actually I make it through log in but it soon returns me to log in.
How do I return to yesterdays settings so I can figure out what to do?
I am running a live CD version of Gusty now

[Goldfinger]

Re: Repair KDE 4.XX botched update?

The same thing happened to me (well on a friend's laptop that I migrated from windows to kubuntu).

This is what I figured out:
1 - from grub menu, boot into recovery mode and choose root shell.
2 - login with root's password
3 - run 'apt-get -f install' and let it correct some things.
4 - run 'apt-get autoremove' to remove some old / unused packages.
5 - reboot and this should allow you to login into KDE.

The above allowed me to login again.
But then I found that the keyboard did not work, so I finally figured out that the user's ~/.kde stuff should be deleted. Make a copy first so that you can restore some portions of it later (if you need).
After this the keyboard worked.

There other problems though:
1 - All windows have no frame, i.e. no borders, title bar etc. This means that they cannot be managed (i.e. moved, resized, iconified, etc). So some apps come up full screen (like gwenview) which means that you cannot continue to use KDE. You have to do something like shift-tab or alt-esc (it forget which)
to bring up the task manager and kill the app. Basically KDE is unusable.
2 - It seems that some widgets he had setup are no longer distributed so there are little icons on desktop and taskbar with a red X.

Let us know how things turn out for you, at least you should be able to log in after the fix above.