You should have a launcher bar on the left of the screen with a number
of icons in it, from the top: Dash, Home, Firefox, Libre Office ( 3 of
these for Writer, Calc, Impress ), Ubuntu Software Center, Ubuntu One,
System Settings, Workspace Switcher. So, do you see these ?

Along the top you should see a thin black bar with the logout icon as
well as a few others on the right. Is this also present ?

Also was this a clean creation of dual-boot and did the installation
screens seem normal, i.e. you were able to set location / keyboard etc
without any problems ?

I saw all of those on the live CD but once loaded not available. This
laptop has been dual boot for a long time. I have a separate partition
for Root about 26 GB and Home about 57 GB, 2 GB for swap. I haven't had
any problems on other Distros on this PC. The only thing I could do was
right click and change the background. I tried all four sides expecting
something to slide out. There wasn't and of the icons as you describe.
I may have to try again, not sure I want too though.

Sounds like the install didn't go correctly so try logging into
Windows then deleting the Ubuntu related partitions, leaving the freed
up space unformatted, then try again letting Ubuntu use the empty
space to install into.

Sounds like the install didn't go correctly so try logging into
Windows then deleting the Ubuntu related partitions, leaving the freed
up space unformatted, then try again letting Ubuntu use the empty
space to install into.

Mint13 is effectively Ubuntu 12.04 with a different skin so you should
be able to just install the Unity desktop to 'convert' it to 12.04 and
switch between them just by logging out / select the skin / logging
back in again. That's the flexibility of Linux - the same core can be
made to look very different to suit the user and what they are doing.

I would log out and change the session to Ubuntu 2D as see if it works.
Then I would remove ubuntu-desktop and re-install.