ubuntu 11.10 unity turns grey and touchpad mouse stops working/freezes [SOLVED]

all of the sudden, mid session, my interface went grey and the theme vanished so everything looked like an old theme and the mousepad mouse cursor wouldnt move, but i could still type and use the keyboard. to fix this i opened a terminal and ran these commands:

sudo modprobe -r psmouse
sudo modprobe psmouse

source: http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-77612.html