problem after this morning's update

Hi all,

I hope somebody could help me solve this situation. I logged in this morning and synaptic's update box popped up with a bunch of software update (including abrowser, kernel etc). After updating & rebooting, the following is broken:
- abrowser doesn't start at all;
- evolution opens up, but then I click on the windown or try to open a message, it immediately crashes;
- the menubar/taskbar shows nothing at all (I have to reboot/shutdown via terminal)
- /boot shows up as a mounted volume my desktop (I'm not sure it showed up before) [btw my disk was encrypted at trisquel's installation]

I tried rebooting with other kernels (3.13.0-137-lowlatency, 3.13.0.141-lowlatency) but all the above problems persist.
Current kernel: 4,4,0-32-generic

Could this be a non-kernel issue? What should I do next?

Thank you!