Invisible panel on LinuxPPC

["Nilsson, Rik" <RiNilsson keyww com>]

For whatever reason, my user-account initial panel in LinuxPPC has become
invisible.

The user has a background jpg displayed and is using WindowMaker.
The panel config includes the defaults plus modem-lites and some application
launchers.

At each login I am alerted that "...a panel is already running, do you wish
to start another?" I have to reply "Yes" and then I get a right-edge
vertical panel duplicating the customized configuration. The original panel
never becomes visible. For  this session then, the panel functions normally.

I've seen answers to other posts saying to delete .gnome directories. No
matter how many times I remove all the user's Gnome "."-directories it
always does this on subsequent logins to this user account. If I terminate
the panel job with "kill -9 id", the panel restarts but is still not
visible. Typing "panel" at the prompt of course, always results in the above
alert that there is already...

My root account and another "guest" account do not exhibit this behavior, so
I am inclined to think the main Gnome program is not dysfunctional, that the
problem is in the user directory.

Before I remove and re-create the entire user directory, I thought I'd ask
if there is something I am overlooking.

Rik