trouble with appearances and background

Ive tried a number of keyword searches and can’t seem to find my problem. So hopefully someone on here knows what’s going on or can point me to a thread that i couldnt find myself.

It just started happening today, and i was tinkering around with a few settings but I can’t really remember what I did. I know stupid of me. But that’s where i am.

Anyway I can’t change the background or themes of my desktop. If i click on the appearences tab OR if i right click the desktop and click change background my computer logs out and then when it logs back in it changes to a dark theme (or light one if i was already on the dark theme)

The same thing happens when i click on the Nvidia x server settings and try to change a setting in there.

Everything else works fine as far as I can tell.

Is there some way i can get a log produced that would better help someone diagnose what’s going on?

Ok start with saying which desktop. KDE gnome, some other??

I switch from windows, which I can tech support, to linux, which I can’t and I end up forgetting the basics of giving as much information as possible.

My bad, sorry about that. It’s a Gnome Desktop

Regardless.

When I restarted the computer this afternoon the problem was gone. Would be nice to know why it happened in the first place though, but I don’t even know how to duplicated it.