gnome-panel freezes - is there a fix

[Gábor Iglói <mdjake gmail com>]

I'm new to gnome-list so hello everybody. I'm from Hungary and working
as a young doctor and of course I like Linux.

I've recently replaced the OS on our computer of the doctors' room to
a Hungarian Linux distribution called UHU-Linux, which is a
Gnome-based distro (2.8.3 I think).

I try to write briefly the problem:
- when a user put an audio CD in the CDROM an icon called Audio CD
appears on the Desktop (thanks to the hal integration)
- if the user clicks on the icon Nautilus brings up a cdda:///
location showing the music files of the CD
- sometimes clicking on these musics causes the gnome-panel to crash
and after a loop starts: it crashes again and again and can't be
repaired

I know - or think - that this can be the distro's bug either (and I
think it has something to do with the Notification area) but here's
what I would like to ask on this list:

This cdda:/// location is rather useless for us because
gnome-cd-player handles the audio cds automatically and fine but the
appearing icon of Audio CD causes some curious users to click on it
and gives the opportunity to trash the system due to the described
mediocre bug. So our heart wouldn't be broken if either 1. the Audio
CD wouldn't appear on the Desktop at all (while pendrives, Data CDs
etc would still do) or 2. Nautilus wouldn't handle the audio CDs with
the cdda:/// location. This way users couldn't click on the
system-killing WAV files.

By the way I'm very curious about what one can do if the gnome-panel
crashes and enters in an unfixable endless crash-restart loop. I could
manage such crashes ocassionally with different version of Gnome/Linux
distros but couldn't recover from it. The only way to fix the system
which I know is to create a whole new user and set up all of the
applications again. Because of this I thought that the origin of the
panel crash is somewhere inside of the user's home directory. So I've
already tried to delete/move the affected user's directories
containing .gnome settings. But even deleting all of the gnome dirs
from home (e.g .gconf .gnome2 .metacity .nautilus etc etc) couldn't
fix the broken panel. Only starting over again with another newly
created user... So does anybody here know what to do with a broken and
continously restarting panel?