I've just updated a machine to XUbuntu 14.04 (LTS) from the last LTS release. I've had numerous problems, but something I'm making no progress with is a problem with the display.

Text and window borders etc seem to display OK, but standard file manager icons don't. Some graphics look a bit odd - e.g. Tweakubuntu splash screen which I recall as green and dark grey, comes out washed out, very faint grey and barely readable. Some lines of text that should be highlighted, seem to be almost anti-highlighted - thin faint green foreground text with no highlight line (whereas on another machine, there should be background highlight).

In synaptic and log file viewer, the text in the top right pane of the display, that is the pane that displays packages that you are choosing to install or uninstall, is cunningly displayed in white on white, i.e. completely invisible. Sometimes by scrolling the mouse wheel or resizing the window, I can get the text to appear.

I know that synaptic is working because if I use ssh -X to connect to this machine from another, and run synaptec remotely using x windows forwarding, then synaptic appears and works correctly. This confirms to me that it's a display issue, but I'm at a bit of a loss on how to tackle it.

File managers: they show the file names, but some of the file or folder icons appear, some don't. Moving the mouse around makes some appear, and some disappear.

The machine has an old nvidea card, and uses the nouveau display driver. I've tried reinstalling this. There's no obvious (to me) display problems shown in dmesg. I will be trawling through the log files to have a look, (but log-file-viewer doesn't show log text either).

Any ideas how to go about fixing this? Where are display config settings to tweak. How can I reinstall/fix?

There is an xorg.conf file but removing this makes no difference.

Any help/advice gratefully received!

Steve