<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> <meta content="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1" http-equiv="Content-Type"> <title></title> </head> <body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000"> Hello: I did all the things you suggested but nothing seemed to work. I was at my wits end due to all of my programs that I used were on the top menu panel and I could no longer open any programs. I finally had to reinstall and this time put my program shortcut icons on my desktop instead of in the menu panel. After a couple of times of restarting the computer, the menus are gone again! I am able to get to the programs I use most frequently, but still can't get to the menu options I need such as "system" to get to the system preferences and what have you. The screen's original resolution was set for 1280x800 which I didn't set, but the computer did from the installation and so I left it that way. Is there some way to fix this problem that keeps happening? It is driving me crazy!!! Thank you again for all your help! Mark NoOp wrote: <blockquote cite="mid:gjbqf4$pp7$1@ger.gmane.org" type="cite"> <pre wrap="">On 12/29/2008 04:17 PM, markfpyles wrote: </pre> <blockquote type="cite"> <pre wrap="">Hi everyone: I have a big problem. I am running Ubuntu 8.04 (Gnome desktop) on a Dell Inspiron 1525 laptop and when I closed the computer down everything was fine, but when I started the computer up the menu panel at the top of my screen was gone and also my taskbar at the bottom. All I am left with is a blank desktop. Is there a way to get my menu at the top of my screen to work again? Please tell me I don't have to re-install everything. Thank you. Mark </pre> </blockquote> <pre wrap=""> My _guess_ is that when you started back up the desktop defaulted to 800x600 resolution and the menus are still there but hidden because of the screen resolution. Try this: Alt-F2 (Alt key plus F2 key) then enter gnome-display-properties and see what the resolution is set at. See if yoiu can reset to 1024x768 or whatever your standard resoluton is. If that doesn't work, then try this: Alt-F2 then enter gksu displayconfig-gtk and try resetting from there. If that doesn't work, then reboot and at the gdm login select "Session" and then "Failsafe GNOME" and login using that. That may get you back to a screen that shows the menus. And if all of those don't work, then reboot and at the grub menu, select the second kernel option for "Recovery". When that finishes booting select the xfix option. That will reset your xorg.conf to a default. When it finishes, select the 1st option to continue to boot normally. </pre> </blockquote> </body> </html>