Ok, so just for fun, I decided to mess around with GNOME a bit more today (as I've said previously, I always switch what I like using). Anyway, I tried to add the Email notifier applet to the panel, and then things froze up. I had to CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE to quit X, and when I restarted into GNOME, the panel was still not responding. Now, I figured that I should just be able to delete some settings or something and everything would be fixed. But, I can't seem to find where they are. I removed my entire .gnome* directories, but to no avail. Even my desktop background remains the same. What and where are the settings I need to delete so that I can fix this?

I just did some heavy browsing & found it for you: It seems like everything is stored in ~/.gconf/apps/panel/applets.

~/.gconf/apps/panel/general/%gconf.xml also seems to have the layout

Also instead of restarting X to restart the gnome-panel just try a killall gnome-panel. It should destroy/recreate the panel.


Hope that works for you, you may have to do some digging to find the right one, some of my applets seem to be named applet_0, but by looking at the XML files in their directories I can figure out what they are.

Actually, I forgot to mention, but I deleted everything in .gconf and .gconfd just for good measure. Still no luck.

Found the problem. For some reason, the mail-apple process was still running, even after X was killed multiple times. So was gnome-vfs. Killed both, and it works now.