I'm using KDE in Fedora 16 and it has been working okay. But now my menu icon is gone. All the rest are there except the menu, the one that's always
on the left side, looks like a lowercase "f". The one you right click on to edit the menu or left click to raise the menu. I can't recall doing any
changes to the panel. I have no idea what might have caused this. How can I restore the menu icon? Or, what is the command to bring up the menu? Or,
what is the command to bring up the program to edit the menu? Maybe I can restore the menu icon from that? Thanks ahead of time.

Maybe it is due to a crash?
use widgets from top right corner

Thank you for your reply. I tried what you suggested and the best I can do is create another panel with the system menu icon already on it. But it's up top and I see no way to move it to the bottom to replace the panel I have there. I'd like to be able to do that and then delete the panel without the menu icon but not only can I not move the newly created panel but I can't get some of my custom made launcher icons moved to the new panel. So for now I have started a new thread trying to learn how to run fsck on the OS partition. It seems all of the old methods of making fsck run on boot such as "shutdown -rF now" no longer work. Also "touch /forcefsck" and then reboot don't work. Your mention of it possibly being caused by a crash is what has me wanting to do that. It made me think back and I HAVE INDEED had two system crashes, both while using Firefox.

I booted a boot disc, RIP 7.8, and ran a fsck on the OS partition and it indicated the file system is fine, nothing wrong there. Which is good to know. But now I'm stuck with this huge blue "K" icon on my desktop (I don't like icons on my desktop) which I can't get to move onto my taskbar panel. Argh! It was problems like this that made me switch from Gnome3 to KDE.

Okay I finally fixed it. I created a new panel which installed itself with the program launcher in the top of the screen. I then recreated all my custom launcher icons the menu editor, making sure I checked "Use Only in KDE" for each one. I then closed menu editor after saving and opened the menu, found each launcher icon I wanted on the panel and left clicked them and clicked "Add to Panel". After that I deleted the old bottom panel then left clicked the upper panel and clicked "Panel Options". A panel appeared with options including one to move the panel and I moved it to the bottom. I hope this helps someone else.