Only background is there, no icons, blank screen

I am using dual boot in my pc with win10 and Ubuntu 14, Until now everything was working fine... Suddenly today when I tried to login to Ubuntu, login screen came as normal but strangely after login no icons or anything is displayed, only desktop background and cursor was present.. Someone help me out here...

2 Answers

Probably unity plugin is disabled. Press ctrl+alt+t and type ccsm, accept with enter. Find and click on ubuntu unity plugin and (if not) check it.

If you haven't got ccsm, install it :

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager

Found a perfect solution for this problem : had the same prob in friends lap , used the following commands alt+ctrl+f2 , in terminal "sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop^"

This installed all the missing application like unity and gnome, etc, . I didn't have to completely reinstall Ubuntu for this problem.