I wish I had your luck... A lot of fixes on forums constantly suggest to uninstall first. Which sometimes actually fixes issues. Other times it makes things worse. Either way - buying a lottery ticket soon?
A lot of people seeking and offering help on forums are former Windows users, who are used to doing that to fix problems. They just don't what else to do, so that's what they do.
And, sure, if you break a configuration file or package dependency, wiping the disk and reinstalling will fix that--but so would fixing the file or dependency. In my experience, the nuclear option is never necessary with Linux. Worst case, you boot off a CD or USB drive, mount the partition, chroot if necessary, fix it, and reboot.
> Other times it makes things worse.
That is very strange, indeed. D:
> buying a lottery ticket soon?
Haha, nope, been having this "luck" for years now, but it only seems to affect my Linux installs. :(
And just yesterday my Linux did what I've never seen an OS do before - it losts it UI clock display. The solution was simple and typical for Linux - it involved killing a random process. But at that moment I realized that we used to laugh that rebooting stuff is the Windows way of doing things. Not anymore, apparently.
;).
What desktop environment was that? There are many different ones available for Linux systems, and they don't all behave that way. e.g. I've never had that kind of problem with KDE3/TDE or KDE4.