Upstart cannot connect so no desktop is shown

[jdfalk]

Attempt to login to ubuntu system and it fails, it shows the background but nothing else. Troubleshooting led me to look at .xsession-errors which pointed at upstart. Attempt to use upstart-udev-bridge on it's on and it says:
upstart-udev-bridge: Could not connect to Upstart: Failed to connect to socket /com/ubuntu/upstart: Connection refused

Systemd is the default and works like it is supposed to. I removed upstart and I can login again. However, that removes unity, ubuntu-desktop and a whole host of other useful things. It would be nice if I could have a solution to the login issues but I would settle for a general purge of upstart from every package.

tail .xsession-errors
openConnection: connect: No such file or directory
cannot connect to brltty at :0
upstart: Failed to spawn upstart-udev-bridge main process: unable to execute: No such file or directory
upstart: unity-gtk-module pre-start process (2523) terminated with status 127
upstart: dbus pre-start process (2534) terminated with status 127

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 15.10
Package: upstart 1.13.2-0ubuntu16
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.2.0-25.30-generic 4.2.6
Uname: Linux 4.2.0-25-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.19.1-0ubuntu5
Architecture: amd64
Date: Sun Jan 24 20:06:25 2016
InstallationDate: Installed on 2015-05-10 (260 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu-Server 15.04 "Vivid Vervet" - Release amd64 (20150422)
ProcEnviron:
 TERM=xterm-256color
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: upstart
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to wily on 2015-10-26 (90 days ago)
UpstartBugCategory: Session
UpstartRunningSessionCount: 2
UpstartRunningSystemVersion: Error: command ['initctl', '--system', 'version'] failed with exit code 1: initctl: Name "com.ubuntu.Upstart" does not exist
upstart.upstart-dbus-session-bridge.log: upstart-dbus-bridge: Unable to write pid file: No such file or directory

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Alberto Salvia Novella (es20490446e)]

Bug #1537616 can be related.