[nmglug] hosed my Jaunty!!

[Brian]

Was working away on my Toshiba laptop when compiz crashed and screen res 
dropped. I tried to reset screen res with preferences>desktop but there 
were no options and my monitor wasn't recognized. I thought to log out 
and in but the screen has never come back. I rebooted into failsafe mode 
and on command line tried startx. A black screen with a bit of color at 
the top. I tried reconfiguring xorg.conf but no change.
I'm running the Karmic live cd now and I'll just use it for the time 
being. May have to install it as a last resort but I hate to lose all 
those apps.
BTW, this is that Wubi install (don't ever do that!!) and I can access 
all my files from the live cd and they are safe on the windows partition.
So I guess I'm stuck. I can try to backup everything to a remote drive 
and install Karmic the right way but I'd ideally like to get my display 
going so I can clean up things first.
Any ideas?