synaptic and krunner won't start, windows don't close on exit, system is slow.

[kubuntuforumsuser]

...and to add to the title, some windows open up blank with nothing in them to click on.
To me this seems to imply that there are more problems still waiting to be discovered.

Also: Synaptic keeps reporting broken packages but does not list any when I look for them in the broken packages section, and it also was reporting Authentication errors listed against blank lines that had no information about which package was causing the authentication issues.

I have tried the following from a command line:
sudo apt-get -f check
sudo dpkg --configure -a
...and neither of these things seems to fix Synaptics complaints about broken packages and whatnot.
The latest NVIDIA drivers have been installed manually and my graphics card was listed at NVIDIA as being supported by that driver. No errors were thrown during installation, and the system appears to not be using the driver at all even though it states that it is in the configuration settings etc.

Synaptic, Krunner, firefox, and most programs I've tested will run from the command line but don't appear to run at all when clicking on there icons in krunner (once it is started from the command line) or from browsing to them from the start menu.

Its as if all the GUI stuff just quit working all together and now I'm back to doing everything via the command line.

Question:
1.) What could be causing this?
2.) What can I check, or look into, or report back here, to help narrow the problem down to something that can be fixed or bug reported?
3.) How can I tell if the system is so broken that a complete install from scratch would be the best or quickest solution?

Thanks.

[kubuntuforumsuser]

Not sure if this helps figure out what is happening, but if I try and reinstall plasma-desktop:
sudo apt-get install --reinstall plasma-desktop

I get this unhelpful general error message:
Reinstallation of plasma-desktop not possible, it cannot be download.

which is strange because I'm connected to the Internet just fine as evidenced by this post.

One more strange thing:
Trying to select text in Konsole makes it unresponsive and I have to terminate the program either right clicking on the taskbar icon and selecting close then terminate or using a different terminal emulator (an xterm window) to kill the process by searching for it using:
ps -aef |grep konsole

[Snowhog]

Let's see your /etc/apt/sources.list file

[kubuntuforumsuser]

Ok, I was able to copy the sources.list file to a sources.txt file in a terminal and have attached sources.txt to this message.

[kubuntuforumsuser]

Also note that the CD drive isn't being recognized so I can't reinstall from a CD even if I wanted to, and today Krunner is opening as a blank window with nothing in it.
I can start a k3b process from a terminal but it wont show itself on the desktop, and from the desktop it looks as if k3b was never started.

UPDATE:
I was able to get the correct path to my blank dvd by:
wodim ATAPI:0
Which detected CD-R drive on /dev/sr0 even though this was a DVD drive.
I had to do it that way because wodim -scanbus, and wodim --devices didn't detect anything so /dev/sr0 is all I had to go by.

I was then able to copy an iso image to a blank dvd by doing:
wodim dev=/dev/sr0 speed=4 padsize=63s -pad -isosize -v -eject /absolute/path/to/isofile

I checked the dvd by mounting the device:
mkdir /media/rom0
sudo mount /dev/sr0 /media/rom0
cd /media/rom0
ls -al

...and that shows that all the files for Kubuntu 13.04 were burned to the DVD.
So I guess I'm going to try a complete reformat and reinstall from scratch on this computer.

I'm going to backup some files before I get started so if any one has any idea's on how I might fix the problem without a complete reinstall, now would be the time to let me know.

Thanks.

[Snowhog]

I don't see anything amiss with your sources.list file.

Before we can begin to trouble shoot your issue, if you can, tell us what happened/what you did just prior to this happened.