death of gnome-panel

[Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>]

My desktop (Fedora Core 1) suddenly starting having strange behaviour;
the panel would repeatedly crash, with no usable messages in
~/.xsession-errors.  Not having debug symbols around, I can't even get a
backtrace.  I had to delete my panel settings in gconf (and thus go back
to a default panel setup) for it to stop crashing.

The problem seems to be in the menu code.  If I have a menu bar, the
panel crashes as soon as that loads.  (That being why I had to do the
above)  If I have a main menu icon, however, it still crashes - but only
when I click on the icon.

Nautilus doesn't show any weird behaviour while opening applications:///

The only messages in ~/.xsession-errors that are even panel related are:
Unable to open desktop file moe-0046e60e76.desktop for panel launcher:
Error reading file
'file:///home/smiddle/.gnome2/panel2.d/default/launchers/moe-0046e60e76.desktop': File not found
Unable to open desktop file gegl-00b4df4f0c.desktop for panel launcher:
Error reading file
'file:///home/smiddle/.gnome2/panel2.d/default/launchers/gegl-00b4df4f0c.desktop': File not found
Unable to open desktop file
applications:///Office/redhat-word-processor.desktop for panel launcher:
Error reading file
'applications:///Office/redhat-word-processor.desktop': File not found
Unable to open desktop file
applications:///Office/redhat-presentations.desktop for panel launcher:
Error reading file
'applications:///Office/redhat-presentations.desktop': File not found
Unable to open desktop file
applications:///Office/redhat-spreadsheet.desktop for panel launcher:
Error reading file 'applications:///Office/redhat-spreadsheet.desktop':
File not found
Unable to open desktop file
applications:///Accessories/redhat-print.desktop for panel launcher:
Error reading file 'applications:///Accessories/redhat-print.desktop':
File not found

This problem manifested itself suddenly while quitting out of
OpenOffice.org's Impress (viewing the Robert Love FOSDEM Slides; how's
this for Utopia, eh? :P )

Any advice on how to fix this irritation, or what I can do to track down
the cause (and thus fix it and file a useful bug report) would be most
happily accepted.  :)
-- 
Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>
AwesomePlay Productions, Inc.