Unable to login to LL

[Kirkx]

My LL has been working flawlessly for the last few weeks and today, out of a blue, I can't login. It seems to be booting ok and the problem is at the login screen. I removed the splash screen long time ago and I boot all my distros from Grub4Dos bypassing Grub2:

Code:

# Grub4Dos file Menu.lst
title Linux Lite
root (hd0,20)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-3.13.0-32-generic root=UUID=4ghka89-5586-3b77-8r6c-49f28g17d4n9 ro
initrd /boot/initrd.img-3.13.0-32-generic

This way I can see how the bootup scripts are executed line by line, and there is no difference between how they run today and before, so the bootup process looks ok. When the login screen comes up (the screen with the user name and password) I enter the password and hit Enter. At this point LL would normally load startup applications but instead the login screen comes up again. It looks like I was entering the wrong password, but the password is correct, I have never touched the user account menu and never changed the password since original installation.

I wish I had a Clonezilla image backup but I keep putting this off, there are so many other things to learn.

My last commands in LL yesterday were as follows:
 

Code:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
sudo apt-get autoremove

At this point there were no messages about any outstanding updates or files to be removed and I hit:

Code:

sudo shutdown -h now

PS: I post this message after booting to Xubuntu 14.04 (from Grub4Dos, obviously; I don't understand why they made Grub2 so bloody complicated, but that's the topic for another thread).