Just updated to quantal 12.10, and Unity works fine, but and I can't get gnome-shell to work :(

Some symptoms:

• when using gdm as the default, it decided to display everything in chinese. When attempting to log in, it accepts the password, and then seems to crash when trying to load my desktop, and seems to restart gdm and send me back to the login screen
• when switching to lightdm as the window manager, it gets a little further (and in english), bringing up a desktop, but a broken one -- the propeller key doesn't bring up a menu, there's no menubar or notifactions area. i can do a few things, like bring up a terminal with ctrl+alt+t, and launch eg firefox from there, but not much else.

I have tried uninstalling gnome-shell, deleting /etc/gdm, and reinstalling

Any other suggestions? Which log files to look at for example?