Getting out of Failsafe mode

Few days ago, for no implicit reason my GNOME installation refused to start. Failsafe mode worked but normal login would throw me back to login screen. Online forums recommended me to check my session scripts and all. But lazy me, i did the following in the terminal.

cp -r /etc/skel/* ~/

What i did was recovered the skel(eton) home folder files and it worked! I lost few settings related to Compiz but rest were all in place.