gnome panel loop

[Haines Brown <brownh hartford-hwp com>]

I'm running RedHat 8.0 with gnome.

In trying out an alternative window manager, I inadvertantly ended up
running both its pager and gnome-workspace (gnome-pager, workspace
switcher) simultaneously. That seemed to be no problem, but when I
typed Alt-F4, it caused a conflict between a workplace jump a window
move, and that was apparently what caused X to crash. 

I backed out of the alternative window manager and returned to the
default wm. 

Now when either root or user starts X, it gets to point of loading the
gnome-panel, but only partly succeeds, and this causes gnome-panel to
crash. The crash dialog pops up, but when I dismiss it, the panel
tries to load again and I'm caught in a gnome-panel crash loop. I
suspect, but am not sure, that gnome-panel crashes when it tries to
load the desktop pager.

I have a backup user named "test," and "test" has no problem starting 
and configuring the panel and pager. For some reason, however, the
panel crashes for both root and normal user, even after a reboot, but
not for user "test." 

The gnome-panel, gnome-preferences, and gnome-screenshot files in
/usr/bin have not changed. 

I looked at the profiles under ~/ for my three gnome panels, but don't
see any problem that I'd know how to fix (the
~/.gconf/apps/panel/%gconf.xml file had a syntax error, but fixing
that did not help). There's plenty of what looks like file dumps in
these folders, however. 

If I uninstall the gnome-panel rpm and reinstall it, will its
configuration be lost? Or will a broken configuration just show up
again so that the loop problem persists?

Where is the gnome-panel configuration held so that I might edit it or
back it up? 

I suspect the problem is not the panel, but only the
gnome-pager/workplace-switcher. What is its executable's name? If I
knew, I could try to uninstall and reinstall it. The gnome manual
section on the workplace switcher is uninformative. If I know the
executable's name I could bring up its man page.

When I manage to fix this and try again an alternative window manager,
how do I disable gnome-panel and/or gnome pager? Can I somehow kill gnome
workplace pager in ~/.Xclients before starting the alternative window
manager?

Haines Brown