Every time I go into the GUI, I see a blank screen. I can launch an xterm and manually try launching gnome-session. After spitting out some material which makes no sense to me, it then slowly continues to repeat "Initializing nautilus-open-terminal".
This happened to me, but with KDE instead of Gnome, and across 3 separate machines. I started rolling packages back to the DVD versions, 2 or 3 packages at a time. Things cleared up and the GUI started working again when I restored fontconfig to it's original version. I left OOo at the latest apt version through all this. I don't know the connection to fontconfig, or even if it was the offending app since it was at the end of my list and it may have been a cumulative effect of rolling KDE and QT back to the DVD versions as well... but it may be worth investigating. What other updates did you do when you did an apt update... try rolling back fontconfig to 2.3.2... I dont' know if it'll work, but it might... apt update isn't always the best thing to run... I've found it pays to be a bit selective when doing apt updates - especially so now with SUSE10 just out... you can't always rely on everything in the apt repositories to work 100% in all situations.. it pays to do only a few packages at a time and test them out before moving on to the next group. C.