A couple of problems encountered...

[gold_finger]

I just had this nagging feeling that choosing "English UK" as my preferred setting was the cause of the problems - is there any reason that this  might be the culprit, or am I being paranoid?

Hard to tell if that was problem or not.  May have been something else that recently installed/updated.  I'm not on Linux Lite machine right now so not sure what log files are there, but maybe one of them may provide clues as to what may have caused problem.  If you want to try searching for possible causes before resorting to re-install, maybe you could post the output from one or more log files to a pastebin site for us to look at.

Navigate to your /var/log directory and open the "dpkg.log" file with a text editor.  Copy/Paste the contents of file into site like this:  http://pastebin.ca/.  It will return a url that you can be used to see what you've posted -- copy that link and post it back here to forum.  Look for any log file that may be related to saving info on "updates" and paste that one as well if it exists.

Tell us as specifically as you can remember "when" you first noticed the problem so we know approximately what time frame in the logs to look at.

Hi Valtam
Thank you for your advice, sorry for being thick - you mean boot from USB, then choose "install alongside windows" as though I didn't have Linux already installed?

No.  This time you will need to select "Something else" option which will bring you to a page showing partitions of the drive.  On that page you need to select the Linux Lite partition(s) and install over what's there.  So you need to know which partitions are which ahead of time.  (Backup/Copy any files you want to keep before re-installing.)

To find that out, boot into your already installed LL, open a terminal and enter this:

Code:

lsblk

The lines that show something under the "MOUNTPOINT" heading are your LL partitions.  If you did a standard install before, you will only see one for "/" and one for "SWAP".  If you later added some kind of data partition to share b/w LL and Windows, that may show as well but is NOT one that you should install over.  For example, here is output from machine I'm on right now:

Code:

NAME   MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda      8:0    0 298.1G  0 disk
├─sda1   8:1    0    25G  0 part /
├─sda2   8:2    0     1K  0 part
└─sda3   8:3    0 223.1G  0 part /mnt/DATA
sdb      8:16   0 596.2G  0 disk
├─sdb1   8:17   0     9G  0 part [SWAP]
├─sdb2   8:18   0   230G  0 part
├─sdb3   8:19   0     1K  0 part
├─sdb5   8:21   0    40G  0 part /mnt/ISOs
├─sdb6   8:22   0    40G  0 part
└─sdb7   8:23   0   200G  0 part /mnt/VBoxHDs
sr0     11:0    1  1024M  0 rom 

The ones showing mount points under "/mnt" are data partitions I added -- they would NOT be replaced during a re-installation of the system.  (If you happen to have a USB stick or drive attached to computer when running lsblk command, that will probably show up with mount point under /media/yourusername -- ignore those during re-installation.)

Chances are you just have LL partitions for "/" (root) and "swap".  "Swap" you can leave as it is -- no need to change anything there.  After "Something else" selected in installer, on next page just click to highlight the partition that corresponds to your "/" partition, then click the "Change" button.  ("/" in my output above corresponds to /dev/sda1.)  Then, Use as = "Ext4 filesystem"; Mount point = "/"; Check box to format the partition; Size = same as it already is, don't change it.  Click "Save" or "Done" (can't remember off hand).  Lastly, near bottom of window, make sure /dev/sda is selected as "Device for bootloader installation".

Double check your entries and then let installer finish installation.  That's it.