gnome3 issues, please help

well.. today my gnome shell started borking or something and i don't really know what's causing it.

let me try my best to describe the situation and provide some screenshots. basically the first problem i noticed earlier was when everything looked like this http://i.imgur.com/RHqHx.jpg simply restarting the gnome-shell fixed that however.

The next thing I noticed later on was that all my desktop icons disappeared as if it reverted to the default settings, i went into dconf and checked and the icons were set to display, i rechecked it though and they appeared again. the final thing i noticed was that when i drag my mouse to highlight icons a non transparent white square shape appears http://i.imgur.com/wWqaF.jpg

i'm not really sure what i did to cause the issue but i'm really looking for assistance here.