panel problems

[Tony Cowell <tonycowell shrimpers force9 co uk>]

Hi all,
this is my first posting to this group.
I have a problem with Gnome which occurred out of the blue. One day it was
fine, then I installed a few apps (cdparanoia and lame).
All worked fine, shut down that night, restarted the next day and the panel
went up the wall!
This is the only thing that I have done that may have caused this problem
is add a path to ld.so.config and run ldconfig (as suggested by CDparanoia)
The gnome footprint has been replaced by a small black square and the word
menu. The popup menu has all icons missing and things like the Gnome
filemanager. The panel has lost the task applett and the clock.
I cannot add these back on as right click on the remander of the panel I
then select add applet but there is nothing there select.
When I shut down X I see a load of messages saying Warning Cannot find
pixmaps gnome-*.png.
Having been through the archives of this list and news groups it seems
re-installing libpng and imlib fix this most of the time. One thing i have
noticed with the other reported problems is that all the error messages are
prefixed with a reference to imlib. The error I get does not specify imlib.
Before I realised this I have re-installed Gnome from the Helix website
which I would presume would install the packages again. Should I re-install
these again?
This is what I have tried to fix the problem:
re-instaled Gnome from the Helix site
Removed .Gnome directories from the home/user directory to allow them to be
re-created (I didn't have much hope here as all users Gnome is the same!)

All the png files it cant find are on the drive in a pixmaps/ dir.


Any help appriciated!
Thanks
Tony Cowell