GNOME starts with "duplicate panel running" error and fails

[Eric Dunbar]

Just as an FYI:

I upgraded Hoary yesterday using Synaptic and it was working alright
(didn't do a system reboot). This morning, when I booted up, GNOME
would go through the start-up motions but then come to a dull brown
back ground with a blank panel and sit there doing nothing. I'd kill
the session (ctrl-alt-Delete) and start up again. Sometimes it'd play
the sounds, sometimes not, sometimes it'd throw up a message saying A
panel is already running. Startup will be canceled (something to that
effect).

I did a sudo apt-get dist-upgrade and it's fixed the problems, but
only after doing a full reboot!

Just as an FYI to anyone else suffering from this quirk & how I fixed
it (presumably something python related didn't install properly
yesterday).

PS This is on a  PPC G3/400 CPU, (PowerBook G3 "Pismo"), 512 MB RAM,
AirPort wireless card (802.11b... though, I doubt that would affect
the startup of GNOME ;-).

Eric.