Issues with gnome? No taskbar/dock/panel.

[Ian Hogben <ianhogben yahoo com au>]

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Hello,

I am running ubuntu hoary, and for some strange reason my panel/dock
whatever will not start with new sessions. So when I log in to gnome, I
get my background wallpaper and that's it. I currently have to start
applications manually, after right-clicking on the background to get a
terminal up.

I don't really have any ideas on where to start troubleshooting this. I
can't find a "what to do when stuff goes really wrong with gnome" howto
on the net. Can anyone point me to a good walkthrough of how gnome
works, or can anyone point me to some logfiles or ways to debug this issue?

I'd like to log in to my desktop as root, but currently root is not
allowed to. It seems that the only way to allow root to log in to the
GDE is through the panel. Which I don't have. :-/ Does anyone know of
the app name that I could launch explicitly from CLI?

Thanks,

Ian.
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