gnome panel won't load

[dpholmes]

i only have one gnome panel on my desktop, running along with the AWN deskbar. recently my computer has trouble loading both, sometimes the AWN toolbar shows up as a huge white box, other times the gnome panel shows up as a large white box. typically if i restart X (ctrl-alt-backspace) and login again, the problem goes away. today i logged in and my gnome panel was gone, and several ctrl-alt-backspace's did nothing to revive it. i have no idea how to get the panel back or why it disappeared in the firstplace.

comp info:
ubuntu 8.04
lenovo t60

[p_quarles]

I am not sure how Gnome starts the panel, but you can restart it mid-session by running

gnome-panel
in a command prompt. Hopefully, this will cause Gnome to remember that it's there and you won't need to do anything else.

[dpholmes]

when i type that command i get the response: "A panel is already running"

i'd like to reply to the terminal, "no, it's not"