Nothing listed in my Applications menu and related issues

[bfootdav]

OK, so I upgraded to 13.10 about 5 days ago. There were issues but I managed to fix some of them. A couple of days ago a new one emerged (i.e., a couple of days after I upgraded) and it's the worst one. The "Applications" menu no longer has anything listed. Related, I assume, is that the Favorites menu no longer has the favorites I added. Also related is that all my file associations are gone (like when I click on a pdf) and there are no applications listed for me to choose the appropriate one.

I ran: kbuildsycoca4 --noincremental but that did not do anything. I've searched throughout the internet and I've found that people have had this problem in the past but there were no proposed solutions that have worked for me.

What might also be related is that when I've tried to log into other window managers the task bars do not show up like with Gnome and Cinnamon. Unity loads but even after all these years I still haven't figured out how to make it work efficiently (plus it's not saving any of my network passwords plus I want to use KDE).

I would appreciate any ideas on how to fix this.

Note: LXDE seems to work OK, but it's the only desktop environment that does.

[bfootdav]

OK, this is odd. I created a new user (not through KDE as the password wouldn't work through it, sigh) which had the same problem. But when I rebooted (yet again) now the menu items are there and at least that part of the system appears to be working. I do not know how or what happened but it's working. I'll start new threads for my other issues.

Update: And it's all gone again. It was a simple update to a few packages and after the update finished everything is gone again. I went through the same process of creating a new user as above but to no avail. I should also mention that neither the new user or any other users on my system have anything in the Applications menu either.