After upgrade to 12.04 Unity worked for me (sort of) but did not support my dual monitors. research suggested this was some sort of bug involving the Nvidia proprietary driver and dual monitors ...

I enabled Xinerama as directed and am now able to actually use the two monitors, which is good, but now Unity completely crashes (no task bar or icons)!

Gnome classic is usable but the panel has the applets over and over (5 user swichers, 5 volume controls, 10 workspace switchers, etc) ... it looks completely ridiculous and I can't seem to remove these extra applets.

Help!!! At this point the simplest route seems to be sticking with gnome classic and removing the extra applets, how can I do that?