11.04 GNOME 2 missing panels

[RoyYoung]

I have been using 11.04 since May and have learn to work with the Unity interface. Today my wife ask to borrow my computer for a few hours since her laptop's power brick broke and the replacement will not get here for a few days. So long story short, since she is not familiar with Unity, I thought I would just change the default DE to GNOME Classic for her. However after rebooting and logging in, I ended up with a blank desktop with no panels or icons. The wallpaper did load so there is a DE running, but nothing seems to respond, including Alt-F1 and Alt-F2 key combos. At least ctl-Alt-Del still brings up the shutdown menu so I was able to restart and get back to Unity desktop. Short of reinstalling Ubuntu, is there something I can do to restore my GNOME 2 set up?

[SalHelder]

That sure is strange because you should be able to see the panels and all, well could you verify if the gnome packages are installed trough synaptic? Anyway you could use XFCE to do the job it's quite similar to gnome.

[jerrrys]

i did a search (googlubuntu) and came up with this

https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-panel/+question/164705

[RoyYoung]

Ok, thanks for suggestions. I finally went into synaptic and just uninstall and then reinstall gnome-panel. That did the trick. In fact I am writing this reply in gnome 2.3 desktop.