[kevs]

Just did reboot, nothing on desktop --hardrives and dock gone -- save for application wizard symbol that does not work.
I booted into my backup os and ran DU on mac hd. said repair not necessary. problem remains. thanks.
called apple, needed full archive and insall, not sure cuplprit.
did all the updates later including the combo and the problem is back! can't believe. on the line again with apple. what is this? never seen such mayhem in 5 years. any ideas appreicated. thanks

[CharlesS]

Can you get into the System Preferences application? If you can, go to Accounts and create a new user account. Then log into the fresh user account and see if you still see this problem. If you don't, then you've narrowed the problem down to something in your home folder.

[besson3c]

What CharlesS said. This might be one of those rare occasions where a permission repair might work too, it is possible that your home directory is not configured to be readable any longer.

[CharlesS]

If the home directory isn't readable, Repair Permissions won't fix it, since it only changes the permissions of files that were installed by the Apple installer and are thus found in the receipts.

[besson3c]

Ah yeah, forgot about that.

kevs, from the other admin account you can try doing a:

chown -R yourusername /Users/yourusername

to set you as the owner of all of the files in your home directory. This is safe to do cause you should own everything in there, but don't bother if you can't see the contents of your home directory and all of the files you expect to see there by doing a:

sudo ls /Users/yourusername