I don't understand from the description how the problem manifests itself. "Broke my GNOME"? Are you thrown back to the gdm greeter just after logging in? Does a failsafe gnome or terminal session work? Any errors is gdm.log? Are you using compiz?
I don't understand from the description how the problem manifests itself. "Broke my GNOME"? Are you thrown back to the gdm greeter just after logging in? Does a failsafe gnome or terminal session work? Any errors is gdm.log? Are you using compiz?