GNOME panel stuck on left side of screen

[Veovis Muad'dib]

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My system:
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Ubuntu 9.10 x64, up to date, less than a day of configuration old.
Dual booting with Windows 7 x64.
Running GNOME with Compiz effects.

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How this happened:
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I was playing with making an application launcher panel, not Expanded, on the bottom left corner, and a window list, again not Expanded, on the bottom right corner, both of which were set to auto hide. I then set the top panel to always show and to hold all of my information I want to always see. I played with this, and decided that maybe the application launcher might look good on the left side, so I set it to do that. It didn't look good, so I tried to reset it to the bottom, but I was unable to even get the panel to pop out, let alone get into preferences.

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What is wrong:
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There is a small, autohiding GNOME panel on the left edge of my screen, that will not pop out, and that I cannot remove. It is annoying because a one pixel edge is sticking out, and when moving the desktop cube, it looks rather bad.

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What I have tried to do to fix it:
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I have tried hovering over the panel for extended periods.
I have tried right clicking on empty space in other panels and seeing if I can get into preferences for the left panel that way.
I have tried looking through all of the settings type applications in the System menu.
I have tried restarting X.
I have tried (with much less hope than the rest of the things I attempted.) restarting the computer.
I have read the man page for gnome-panel, which redirected me to the page for gnome-options, which redirected me to the page for gtk-options.
I have read quickly through the GNOME help included with Ubuntu 9.10.
I have searched Google with five different syntactic variations of my problem, and delved three pages through the results for each.
I have looked through Launchpad for a bug that looked like my problem.
I have asked repeatedly (although tried to not be annoying) on irc.

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Last resort I am trying to avoid:
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Creating a new user would probably fix the problem.

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What I'm doing now:
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Asking on the Ubuntu forums for help in removing the rogue panel.

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Solution: (Provided by kelvin.illa)
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Open terminal.
Type "gconf-editor"; a window will pop-up.
From the folders on the left, go to / > apps > panels > *
* depends on your panel configuration. The settings for the panel you want to configure should be below to "global" folder within the "panel" folder.
When you have the panel you want to configure selected, uncheck a box on the right that writes "auto_hide"

[kelvin.illa]

- Open terminal.
- Type "gconf-editor"; a window will pop-up.
- From the folders on the left, go to / > apps > panels > *
* depends on your panel configuration. The settings for the panel you want to configure should be below to "global" folder within the "panel" folder.
- When you have the panel you want to configure selected, uncheck a box on the right that writes "auto_hide"

This is the reason why I'm not using auto-hide. I want to but I couldn't.

[Veovis Muad'dib]

Thank you very much! That worked.

Autohide works on the top and bottom, but not the sides for me. Oh well.

[kelvin.illa]

glad to help

[rballard]

if you follow the same advice to get to the gconf panel options but set auto_hide_size to a larger size (i had the same problem and mine is set to 10 now and it works) it may help your expand option work.

[Veovis Muad'dib]

The smallest number I can use is 5. What about you?

Thank you for this solution, although my current theme now looks bad with left and right panels, so I'm afraid I won't be using this for now. But the solution is here for anyone else who wants to use it.

[User Abuser]

if there's a menu bar on a stuck panel, you can simply press ALT+F1
Was nice to know that this bug is still in 10.10 :)

[kucerarichard]

Thank you for solution...

Here's a tip: don't sudo for gconf-edit, or you will get the root gconf, and you won't find your autohide setting.

just gconf-edit as yourself.


I ended up deleting the panel anyway and switching entirely to Cairo Dock... (man it's slow, but whatever)