I met with Brian for a bit this afternoon to look at the X problem he
had.

I think the main issue is that this machine dates at least from an
ubuntu 12.x installation.  In the course of all the upgrades and the
superposition of window managers and underlying widget libraries the
various config files got confused, and some binaries just plain don't
run.

I started with an immediate snapshot of essential files, then
experimented with config files for the various desktop environments and
display managers:

rsync -av /home/loginname/ /mnt/whereImountedtheexternaldrive/backup-home-loginname

The only one I could get to invoke properly was the lxubuntu display
manager lxdm, so I installed it, enabled it with a "sudo
dpkg-reconfigure any_dm" and picking lxdm.

That allowed us to log in properly because it did not inherit weird
guest account setups and did not use fancy widget sets.

I then recommended that it would not be time-effective to restore all
config files (some experiments with --purge and --reinstall did not
help).  The advice I gave was to use the backup we made and install
16.04 from scratch.  I left Brian with a script to pick that rsync up
again.

Lots of other weird things about the system -- it had been patched up a
bit inorganically and possibly off-paradigm for package management, but
the data was recoverable.  Being a 3.5gig machine it should work well
with a new install and firefox quantum.
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