From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i586; en-US; rv:1.0.1) Gecko/20020724 Description of problem: Sometimes when I logon to a Gnome session, there is no panel. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): gnome-panel-2.0.2.90-8 gnome-session-2.0.1-3 How reproducible: Sometimes Steps to Reproduce: 1. Log onto Gnome. Actual Results: The desktop appears, but often, the panel is missing. Expected Results: A panel at the bottom of the desktop. Additional info: Possible contributing (old) platform factors: 75 MHz Pentium, 40 MB RAM, 128 MB swap space, no sound card.
This does seem to be a race condition that's more common on slow machines.
I have updated to gnome-panel-2.0.3-3 gnome-session-2.0.3-1 and the panel has appeared after all of 5 logins. However, there have been other random problems like being unable to get a response from right-clicking the background, the dragonfly failing to appear, the desktop icons failing to appear, desktop icons overlapping (#68449), and the following message window appearing once: ------------ There was an error starting the GNOME Settings Daemon. Some things, such as themes, sounds, or background settings may not work correctly. The Settings Daemon restarted too many times. The last error message was: Child process did not give an error message, unknown failure occurred GNOME will still try to restart the Settings Daemon next time you log in. ------------ Given this information, I think it is safe to close this problem as a duplicate of one of the other "race condition" bugs.
Turns out the default session file was mangled. Try with gnome-session 2.0.5-2
I have been using gnome-panel-2.0.3-3 and gnome-session-2.0.5-3 since Thursday and I haven't seen gnome panel disappear in all that time. I have seen the Gnome settings daemon error several times, but this problem is probably beyond the scope of this bug.
Closing this out as the user is reporting the issue resolved.