duh — should have thought of that.
The new user can log into Cinnamon DE and everything looks good; can even rearrange monitors.
So now I need to do some major digging.
2 Likes
I understood your main issue is the monitor setup not working anymore.
Did you compare your current
~/.config/cinnamon-monitors.xml
with an older one from a backup?
{doh! msg apparently got stuck! 
}
ugh … see above! 
The ‘current’ cinnamon-monitors.xml file was last modified Sat 8 Jun 2024, well before the problems. Because I’ve lost confidence in the Cinnamon configuration, I’m copying files from the user experiencing Cinnamon problems, will then delete that user, and then re-create the user. I’ll copy all the data back and the configuration files I really need. It will involve a lot of reconfiguring Cinnamon preferences, but at least I won’t need to reinstall applications and no data will be lost.
Sounds like a plan …
You also could copy the Cinnamon config files/directories over to the test-user one by one and see if the problem pops up with the test-user.
IIRC, this would be
~/.cinnamon/configs
~/.local/share/cinnamon/
~/.config/cinnamon-session/
/usr/share/cinnamon/
/usr/share/themes/
Maybe that’s quicker than recreating the user, but as always, ymmv.