Top of windows are missing

[MG&TL]

Hi everyone. In virtualBox I'm running Edubuntu 11.04. Everything worked fine until a couple of days ago, when the top section, containing the close, minimise and maximise buttons, of all windows vanished and don't appear when I re-open them :x. At the recommendation of TL I ran
metacity --replace ,which restored the tops while I ran the command but the command never finished and if I stopped the command I lost the tops. Also at TL's recommendation I also ran
compiz --replace but that didn't do anything.

Any help will be much appreciated on how to restore the bar permanently.
MG

[Ozymandias_117]

There's probably a more elegant solution, but you could go startup applications and add metacity --replace there.

[MG&TL]

Thanks Ozymandias_117, I'll do that.
MG