schmidtbag wrote:I didn't expect reinstalling would help - usually with such problems it doesn't. You could try sid and see if that helps. Personally I hate Debian's stable and "unstable" branches - to me, they act like old==stable when in fact that isn't true at all. By using sid you do take a chance of something failing on you but considering your quick decision to reinstall, I don't think that would be such a problem to you as long as you recover your stuff. Besides, chrooting can often help in emergency situations.
Oh, I was planning to reinstall anyway. I was running Stable and Testing on the same laptop and was always getting confused what I was doing and where.
I'm interested in following Gnome 3 developments, so I chose Testing.
Thanks for the comments, by the way, much appreciated.
I found a workaround for the Terminal problem, which is to go to to Edit>Profile Preferences>Colours and untick Use colours from system theme.
I would like to know why my user account worked for some time and then didn't, and why other user accounts work as expected. As, if I recreate the account, it works as normal, there must be some file somewhere that I could delete as you suggest to reset Gnome Shell.