Laptop/Ubuntu acting really weird.... almost virus-like

[tonyW303]

My laptop will freeze up completely: Ubuntu stops responding and the Caps Lock light on my keyboard goes on for a second and then goes off for a second and so on and so on. I let it sit there for an hour. It just kept doing the same thing. I forced a shutdown and then rebooted but none of my drivers worked so I rebooted again. This time my drivers worked but after five minutes, my laptop locked up again and did the flashy thing. Again, I reboot. Now, my drivers work, and it's not locking up..... But the bar that has the Applications and Places menus, is gone... Like it doesn't exist... ](*,) Help??
Thanks in advance!
-Tony

[medicalystoned]

what kind of laptop?
I had major issues with an older one, Ubuntu just wouldn't work but Puppy Linux made it haul#$@.

[john.nicholls]

To get the bar back, open a terminal and type
xfce4-panel

[HavocXphere]

I reckon that the underlying cause is hardware. I'd check the temps and run a (long) memtest86+ scan.

[tonyW303]

I'm thinking about going over to Puppy Linux or Slackware. Both run very well on my laptop (It's a Compaq Presario 2100 with an AMD Athlon Mobile Processor). Is there like a settings transfer manager or something?
Thanks!