no desktop

[Simon]

When I came onto the computer this morning I found that gnome-panel was 
taking 99% cpu for no apparent reason. I rebooted and the system went 
down and back up successfully. When I log in though, everything loads 
apart from the desktop. It stays the default blue colour instead of 
loading my background image, no icons are displayed, and I cant interact 
with it by right clicking (nothing happens). Im a bit stumped really as 
I cant find any error messages anywhere.

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Simon wrote:
| When I log in though, everything loads
| apart from the desktop. It stays the default blue colour instead of
| loading my background image, no icons are displayed, and I cant interact
| with it by right clicking (nothing happens).

1. Hit Ctrl+Alt+F1 before logging in through GDM.
2. Login using the terminal
3. From your home directory, delete all GNOME related "."files (.config,
.gconf, .gconfd, .gnome, .gnome2, .gnome2_private, .gnome-desktop,
.metacity, .nautilus)
4. Exit and Hit Ctrl+Alt+F7 to get to the login screen
5. Hopefully now you can login (although all GNOME settigs will have
been lost)

Cheers,
- -M
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[Johnathan Bailes]

On Wed, 02 Mar 2005 11:52:20 +0000, Simon <admin(a)thelight.org.uk&gt; wrote:
>  When I came onto the computer this morning I found that gnome-panel
> was
>  taking 99% cpu for no apparent reason. I rebooted and the system went
>  down and back up successfully. When I log in though, everything loads
>  apart from the desktop. It stays the default blue colour instead of
>  loading my background image, no icons are displayed, and I cant interact
>  with it by right clicking (nothing happens). Im a bit stumped really as
>  I cant find any error messages anywhere.
>   
The previous poster has the right idea btw.  Which is unfortunate
because you lose all your settings.  You should really not have to
reboot to resolve this.

I have had this happen to me occasionally, once a year or so since I
have been using gnome for like 5 years on average.

It is usually resolved by logging out (not rebooting) and then doing
the CTRL+ALT+F6

for a terminal login.

Then you do a ps -ef | grep <username>  

Whack all the gnome related processes still running under your name.  

Then you can log back in and everything should be fine.