login screen has no password field after aborting shutdown command

[jason]

After running the sudo shutdown +10 command, I ended up closing the terminal and shutting down manually before the 10 minutes. After reboot the login screen did not have a password field and when I would click on my username it would say "Authentication failed". I had no recent updates installed via the update manager that would have otherwise have caused this issue.

I resolved this issue by rebooting into recovery mode and re-installing gnome-session using the command line:

sudo apt-get purge --reinstall install gdm gnome-session

This bug was reported previously here:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gdm/+bug/666595

But it was closed due to inactivity.

Description: Ubuntu 10.04.3 LTS
Release: 10.04
gnome-session: Installed: 2.30.0-0ubuntu1

Expected: To be able to type password
Instead: No password field displayed