Programs not opening

[Hardcoretexan]

I booted up and most of my programs are not opening, they show I clicked on them but do not open. Firefox, thunderbird, backup and restore, uninstall etc. I heve rebooted and repaired broken pkgs. repaired boot loader but nothing helped. Terminal works and I was able to open system summary but hardly anything else.I have been using this computer to get comfortable with linux so I am not well versed with the operations but I would like to try to repair it and get some use out of it. If I have to format and start over I would not lose anything important.

Inspiron 1525LL 3.4kernal 4.4.0 -128 generic (x86_64)

[bonnevie]

Hi!
I'm not an expert here. All I can say about your situation is that the same exact thing happened to me a week ago when I installed LL4.0.  My graphic card, NVidia 8200G, didn't play well with the NVidia driver recommanded.  I almost bricked my laptop.
I reinstalled and selected Xorg, which was the second choice and it solved the problem.  Hope this can help.

[Hardcoretexan]

This is not a new install though, this is 16.04 and although the updates may have caused problems I would think I should still be able to revert to a previous backup.
Thanks anyway.