Menu bars and launcher missing (after tampering with xorg.conf)

I'm completely new to Ubuntu, and I'm trying to get to know the various stuff in here. One of these things was to set my screen resolution to 16 bit, in order to play an old game. After browsing through a bunch of questions here, I figured I had to create an xorg.conf file in /etc/X11 (in the latest version of Ubuntu, this file didn't already exist, I think), and fill it with

Section "Screen"
Identifier  "Default Screen"
Monitor     "Configured Monitor"
Device      "Configured Video Device"
DefaultDepth    16 
EndSection

And I did.

After doing this and rebooting, however, I found my desktop displaying 16 bit colour depth, but there was no launcher, no menu bars at the top of the screen, or at the top of any open folder or program. Luckily, I had an applications folder on the otherwise empty desktop, and managed to browse through other folders from there. But most applications in the folder now have blank icons, and new names, ending with ".desktop", and attempting to open them results in "Untrusted application launcher The application launcher "debian-xterm.desktop" (or any other name) has not been marked as trusted. If you do not know the source of this file, launching may be unsafe." And there's only a cancel button present. Not option to launch anyway. This, however, has been partially resolved through the terminal, where I sudo chmod +x the applications I need to use (network, firefox and things like that). Going through all the applications this way seems like a lot of hopefully unnecessary work, though.

I've looked at a lot of different questions about the menu bars and launcher missing, but none have helped fix the problem. I managed through the terminal to delete xorg.conf, and while the screen is back to 32 bit, the launcher and menu is still missing. The super key (windows key on my keyboard) doesn't work either.

Any ideas what I could do to make things work again?

ETA: Typing sudo chmod +x /home/jarle/Desktop/applications/*.desktop fixed all the application files. And I figured that one out all by myself. Yay!

Now, all I need is the launcher and menus...

Solution 1:

I assume your unity configuration is messed up. According to this, do the following in a terminal:

sudo apt-get install unity-tweak-tool
unity-tweak-tool --reset-unity