one day you wake up... and everything's gone!

[Michaël Van Dorpe]

Hello! I'm e-mailing this from Internet Explorer in Windows XP... yes,
indeed, I believe something has gone wrong.

I started my computer this morning, with Ubuntu 5.04, gave my username
and password, the splash screen came up, with the log on sound, and
then I had a brown background (which is not my standard background), I
could see the top and the bottom panel, without any applets on them,
no clock or anything, and also a gdesklet on my desktop loaded just
fine.

Everything else was not there: icons, notification area, other
applets, menus, etc... I also cannot get a Alt+F2 window to start
programs. I cannot right-click the desktop. I can change to my other
workspace with Ctr-Alt-Right.

Yesterday, I updated the linux-headers, as asked by the update
notifier. Also, last week or so, I changed to the 686 image and
removed the previous image. I also started reading
www.linux-tutorial.info and explored the things on my system that
tuturalial was talking about, but that was fairly innocent I think. I
installed some standard packages (not from backport), such as
ephiphany and gnumeric, and removed some other packages, such as
gnome-meeting. It's possible that I have rebooted several times since
I did all this, and thus it may be irrelevant. I also ran folding at home
for a couple of hours.

Could you please get me in the right direction? I'm quite confident
that, in the end, everything will be fine again, but if I didn't know
how active this mailing list is, or even if I didn't have access to
the internet (thanks to windows xp!), I think I would start panic...

I'm sure I will learn a lot from your answers and from this whole situation :-D

Thanks a lot,

Michaël Van Dorpe