Revive corrupt user

[Alex Makhlin <makhlina gmail com>]

Hi,

I am an IT professional but quite new to Linux. I am using Fedora 9 and 
a few times now, most of which have been my fault, I will experiment 
and/or make some changes that would then give me errors while logged in 
as my personal user or at times I cannot even get to the desktop. The 
only fix I have found is a fix of a novice. I just create a new user, 
copy all my personal files over to the new user, reset all of my 
preferences, and am back up running again. Yesterday after running the 
latest Fedora updates, I could no longer get to the desktop of my 
personal user so in the end I had to go through the same process of 
creating a new user before I could login. But I again had to go through 
the tedious task of copying my personal files and personalising the 
settings of the new user.

Here is the question: Is there any way to backup my existing user info 
so that I can just restore the backup when I need to and have all of my 
user preferences set the way I left them? I have tried backing up the 
"Home" folder but after restoring it, I still had the same problem.

Any help would be appreciated,
Alex