Gnome meltdown

[Joel Konkle-Parker <jjk3 msstate edu>]

I had somewhat of a Gnome meltdown last night, and I'm trying to pick up
the pieces. I'm using a generic clean tasksel "desktop system" install
of Gnome 1.4 on Woody. Here's what happened:

1. I ejected my pcmcia 802.11b card, since it was causing some problems
(ksoftirqd_CPU0 using 100% cpu, it does this occasionally, ejecting and
reinserting always fixes it)

2. When I reinserted it later, I noticed that the system didn't beep and
the card's LED didn't come on. So, I logged out and rebooted.

3. When I logged back in to Gnome, I noticed that my panel was gone (a
top one). I also noticed that when I started a gnome-terminal, it wasn't
reading my .bashrc. A `source .bashrc` fixes it.

4. Thinking it was a fluke, I logged out and shut down for the night.

5. This morning, I started it up, logged in, and the problem was still
there. Interestingly, the gnome-terminal I left open from last night
read .bashrc correctly when it restarted. New terminals still don't read
it. xterm and uxterm work correctly.

6. The 802.11b card works correctly now.

So, does any of this make sense to anyone? What could cause this to
happen? More importantly, how do I get my panel back, and how to I get
gnome-terminal to source my .bashrc on startup?

Thanks in advance.

- Joel