Comment 2 for bug 1428410

This may be a corner case. Cruft left in my home directory (nvidia related) may have been the cause of the unity/dash failure to materialise. Creating an alternative user and testing it proved the issue was in my profile, so it looks like apt-get purge -f nvidia-331-updates, which is what I did following the circular loop that generated this bug, almost worked.

Deleting the .nv and the .nvidia-settings-rc from the .conf folder in my profile liberated it and normal activity has resumed. This was accomplished by logging in at tty2 (Ctrl-Alt-F2) having arrived at the blank (wallpaper) screen after initial login. (tty7).