(initially posted on /r/KDE but stoked to see there's a community here!)

I have a fairly new Debian KDE install - I've been tweaking and fixing things for the past week quite happily.

Was trying to fix the volume keys not working this evening. Logged into TTY2 and ran showkey --scancodes and showkey --keycodes per a forum post in an attempt to diagnose and fix. When I hit ctrl+alt+F7 to get back to my session, it was back at the login screen, as if I'd typed my password (ie dots entered for password and greyed out as if I'd then hit enter)

And there it stayed.

Reboot brings me to login, type password (fingerprint reader no longer registers) and there it hangs again.

I can log in just fine through the console (incidentally, the fingerprint reader works just fine there). startx will then happily run a gui from there with full access to my files. I've also created a new user via console and I can log in graphically just fine via that one too.

But my main user login remains stubbornly broken. Any ideas on what's happened?