I still have the problem nowadays, so no update that have been released since did provide a fix.
I have observed a few things though, it seems the the problem is not gnome-panel itself but the clock-applet. Sometimes the gnome-panel starts but I have a white rectangle at the place the clock-applet should be. When this happens, when I quit and login again into Xorg, I have the behavior described in this bug report which is no gnome-panel at all, like it is stalled by something. This something would be the clock-applet of course. When I look in the process tree with pstree I can see TWO clock-applet processes. My guess is the following : The clock-applet sometimes doesn't start correctly, crashes, and stalls the gnome-panel. If you try to restart your Xorg it makes things even worse making another clock-applet process. -- gnome-session often doesn't start properly in 10.04 https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/576259 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs