[Dapper] Flight 4 : troubles with gnome-panel

[Vincent Trouilliez]

Hi,

I am having a problem with flight 4, which I don't recall havign with
Flight 3.

When I log-in for the first time, Gnome starts fine. But the next time I
log-in, I get the dreaded "I have detected a panel already running" or
something like that. I keep pressing Enter to close the dialog, but it
keeps coming back, so the panel doesn't load, and Gnome can't start as a
consequence. I killed gnome-panel, which got rid of the error messages,
and allowed Gnome to finish loading. But, the panel load only partially
(some applets don't show up), and it is unresponsive : nothing happens
no matter what I click on, menus, icons...
I tried re-installing the gnome-panel package, doesn't change a thing.

I move ~/.gconf,  ~/.gconfd and ~/.gnome2 out of the way just in case,
but that too didn't change a thing. 
So I tried re-installing the system (made sure to run the CD integrity
check, which passed), and I still have exactly the same problem.

I remember having a similar problem during Breezy's development cycle,
which was caused updatre-notifier haging the CPU, but it's not the case
here, and no other process is hanging the CPU. Actually the system is
responsive, it's only the panel that hangs.

A side problem, is that havign no access to the menus, I can't log-out
cleanly : all I can do is restart X with the keyboard (Alt-Control-BS),
which can only add to the existing the mess I guess :-/

Anyone any idea, or experience the same problem ?

--
Vince