Sudden changes in my desktop!

[Nippur]

Hi there.

Suddenly the way that firefox displays its windows on my screen has changed.
I do not see the "x" to close them nor the toolbar with"archive,edition and so on".
I cannot enlarge the screen of firefox and I can neither scroll through my bookmarked websites.
If I delete my user and create a new one this is solved, but I get trouble trying to use my home directory that I do not want to lose!
Any tips on how to solve this or use the same home directory?
Thank You!
A screenshot of how it looks.

[Nippur]

[Nippur]

Hi!
This is an installation of xfce 4.8 from when it came out.
Always kept it updated.This has also happened in my cousin's laptop twice in which I also installed 4.8.
It never happens to the root account.
I solved it in my cousin's by deleting his user and creating a new one but we lost all his archives  I would not like to lose mine!
I thought this was a hardware incompatibility with his ASUS but it now happens in my ACER laptop 
I have never touched anything related to shared directories so no idea.

[Nippur]

Hi again.
With the last two commands I get "no such file or directory".
I rebooted and still the same.

How can I use the same home directory with a new user that will be named exactly the same as currently?
when I tried this in my cousin's laptop I got this error message wanting to do this.
Thx

[ternor]

It sounds like this Firefox problem.

[GermanTux]

Great find ternor. 

I also had this problem happen to me in another distro 10.04 - with Firefox.  Upgrading Firefox to the next version (I think at the time it was 5 to 6) fixed it. 

[murali]

I'm facing similar changes in my desktop too, though with skype & unetbootin. This is a brand new phoenix install and skype for some reason doesn't show any menu entries, just blank textboxes & dropdown. Only the buttons are visible but no menu labels. Similar thing happened with unetbootin, on launch it showed all possible text/option buttons but all blank and no menu entries. Also it rendered the machine unusable, screen started behaving weirdly, everything became distorted, finally uninstalled the app.

Any idea what the issue could be?

thanks.