I am running Ubuntu 11.10 from VirtualBox.
I installed Gtk+ 3.4.1 (latest stable release) from sources with X11 and broadway backends enabled. In order to do that, I also installed latest versions of glib, libffi, libtiff, libjped, gdk-pixbuf, and pango. Each of them was configured with default options. I.e., they were installed to /usr/local (at least, I see respective folders in /usr/local/include).
After reboot and login (regardless which user), desktop is grey for about 30 sec, nothing is displayed. Then Nautilus starts, but nothing else (my locale is Ukrainian, but there is nothing important in text):
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During boot, I can access command prompt as root, use dpkg, etc. But I don't know what to do. One idea is to reinstall Gtk+ and other libraries with prefix /usr or /usr/shared. I will try that, but it is quite time-consuming, so any ideas would be welcome.
Reverting to earlier snapshot is still possible, but it is 6 days old and I would like to try to solve the problem.