Hit the forums and ask for help.   Be able to offer up details of your upgrade procedure.

In many cases if the auto update fails, you have to do a manual install off of physical media to replace the glitched or "mismatched" files.

You have not kept up as you went along, so you are slapping entire sets of new stuff on top of a file base that is several generations out of date.    Things get missed or get mis-applied when you do this "missing generations" stuff.

Moral of the story is to stay current.   It is assumed you are updating the last set of current files if you use auto update.

Next, I always keep a set of real media on hand for just such occasions.

You are still using Windows, right?   Windows Update Manager considers your machine their turf and will "upgrade" your system to their their versions of the Linux stuff at night now, even inside your Linux partitions.  

This will become a repeated exercise until you get Windows completely off the machine.

Hmmm...

I've been having a problem with firefox.
whenever I changed the number of latest posts from 10 to 20 or more it would give a display of the posts w/out the normal formatting, just about unreadable.

I looked at my setting and it was 'forum default'
changed to 'old style', 'new style', basic and settled on basic.
all 3 did correct the problem.

Mint Update lives under the shield symbol on the bottom right hand side of your screen.

You can also get to the update stuff through the main menus, but the one click on the shield is the easy way to keep track of being current.    The shield changes color  (grows a red center symbol)  to alert you when you are behind on updates.

Try to stay more current, that is all that I am saying.   When you posted you were auto-updating literally 3-4 iterations at one shot I saw that as a separate cause for a lot of weird stuff happening,

Next, Serrobot and Verslagen are right, you may just have a browser issue.   They will work with you on your Firefox issues, I don't use Firefox any more so I can't see what you are seeing.

We at SuzukiSavage.com have gone through waves of the site acting somewhat odd as seen through a particular browser ---- hold off for a bit and if it is a widespread issue it will become recognized by lots of people.

Keep current on your Firefox updates, one of these may fix your issue.   These will appear under your shield icon on the bottom right of your screen and used to happen 3-4 times a year.





Now, to answer your last question, Mint Version AutoUpdate is a much bigger fish to fry.   Once a year Mint will roll up to the next major revision of Mint and the automatic offer to do this shows up for a limited time when you click on the shield symbol to do the normal little Mint mini-updates.  

The shield itself has a little menu inside it, check under Edit to see if an Auto-update is available for what you have now (likely not since they only apply to current updates for folks who stayed current and Auto-update is only available for a short time because it becomes "overcome by events").

You need to read up on the Mint site about these major roll ups as lately they have not gone flawlessly like they used to do in years past.   Fault on this belongs to Ubuntu being a numpty about sloppy upgrades on their stuff, not with the Mint guys who wind up having to fix it.

If you do this shield icon update thing, you will need to do it every time it pops up asking if you want to do it.  All forms of auto update depend on you updating from the existing one while that update is still fresh and relatively un-corrupted.  

SKIPPING UPDATES = BAD

Reinstalling everything from media is an easy way to get back to good function.  Bad thing about it is you will lose all the customized this and that you put into your machine.

Add into it that our free site YaBB software isn't kept software current/latest version either, so there are lots of potential sources out there for some ugly graphics.