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Gnome panel (taskbar) flaked out

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Bazoukas:
Sorry I shoud have been more specific.

Here is what I do in case something goes wrong with one of my user names.

  When I create a user name, all the files I have created (documents, cpp, jpgs, mp3s and so on), I transfer them on my root account.
  If my user name creates a problem (similar to your problem), then I just delete that user name and create it again. Then I copy and paste all the files to the user name and am all set.
  The drawback with this is that you have to customize again your desktop.

  My way is the crude way. Voidmans and creedons way is more educational, and infact I will toy around with the files they said.

creedon:
As I said, I'm a Debian user, and Deb is now using XFree86 4.0; I think you're using XFree86 3.3.  There are several X configuration apps, and I'm not sure which your vrsion of Redhat uses.  Go to XFree86.org (I think) and there are help files available.

dishawjp:
Ok, either I'm even stupider than I thought, or somehow my install is hosed.  I've been messing with this problem for days now, and I think that I've finally managed to just about totally kill Red Hat on my computer.

I did, as Void Main suggested, remove the ~/.gnome directory.  That fixed my panel problem, but created a few other problems, which I played around with a few times.  I never did get some of my icons back, but was able to restore the fd0 icon and the one or Midnight Commander.  Everything was more or less working, but when I would put a data CD in, I would get an error message about fd0.  But I could mount or umount the CDROM and it worked perfectly and so did the floppy. But I wanted to get rid of the error messages and have everything right. Sooooo...

Last night, following bazoukas' advice I decided to delete my account.  I booted to root and did a "userdel" then a "useradd" and put in a password "passwd userid" and rebooted.  I couldn't get into the account. Gnome would ask for a login and password, and would start to load Gnome then die with a blue screen.  No panel, no icons.  I could do a ctrl-alt-F2 and get a virtual terminal though.  So then I rebooted and tried to create a new account name.  Exact same thing.  I tried a lot of other things like editing my /etc/inittab to get the computer to boot to terminal mode and typing "startx" to start Gnome.  Same thing.  I also tried to create the accounts using linuxconf both the text mode linuxconf and the GUI linuxconf and either way, linuxconf would hang and I would have to kill it to exit.  But it DID add the accounts and passwords and all before dying!

Weirdest of all, the old accounts are all still working.  Root, and two other user accounts I had created all work fine.

I tried an "upgrade" reinstall of Red Hat hoping that that would fix things, but no happiness there.  I've tried everything I can think of and want to get this thing back to "normal." There's no important data or anything other than time that I will lose on a fresh install, so if that's the only option, I can live with that.  But I would really rather figure out how to fix it.

As always, thanks in advance for all your assistance.

Jim

HPC GUY:
interesting, Gnome on my work machine is screwed, so i just use KDE just fine. I have been too lazy to try to fix Gnome. when i boot to gnome all it shows is the desktop and nothing else, weird....

voidmain:
When you deleted the user account and recreated it did you give the user a password?  Also when you deleted the user account did you also delete the user's home directory? If you wanted a completely clean new user you would backup the users files under his/her home directory and as root type:

# userdel -r username
# adduser username
# passwd username

When you log in for the first time as that user it should create default gnome settings just like it did when you first logged in. You might also after deleting the username and prior to recreating it check the "/tmp" directory for any hidden sock directories containing that user's name.

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