mint 13 maya cinnamon, no bottom icons after it freezes up after restart.
 

this is something that just started a few days ago. When online the pc will freeze up big time. I have to hard dump the pc (hold start button down until it shuts down) sometimes it will be ok after I unplug the pc from wall and wait a few min. This time,,,,,no dice. No bottom icons at all..none. Finally got the 'menu' icon to show up and go online that way. this is getting worse, not better with time. Do not know why it is going on. I have noticed that it occurs whenever I have downloaded a photo online and try to post it onto facebook...will lock up big time..........it will be working ok for lets say 20min or so...then boom locks up.I am going to need to fix it in order to keep using mint. Windows used to do this too. I have 1.5 gb ram, and 1.87ghz speed.....80gb hard drive......not sure what is going on...PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE SOMEONE HELP ME WITH THIS PROBLEM!

Did you install something before this started happening? Perhaps you have too many applications running at the same time and use all the RAM available?
Is your computer dual core or single core? Maybe the graphical interface is too heavy for the processor? I am just guessing here. I also had this problem so I re installed the OS with a ligther graphical interface like LXDE. It happened to me in Ubuntu, It hasnt happened to me in OpenSUSE or Slackware. those are the distros I have use the most.

Forced turn off your computer might damage your hard drive so when I was having that problem I would ssh to the computer and remotelly turn it off.

it is an older pc, maybe 5 or 6 yrs old? Dell C521, 1.87ghz, 1.5gb ram, 80gb hard drive....
I really dont want to reload mint 13...I have been viewing videos alot lately..youtube and hulu, crackle...other ones too. This is something that caused probs for winxp too. My guess is that it is something related to videos eating up the ram...also have had numerous windows open browsing at same time...will cut back to ONE and ONLY ONE open window while net surfing from here on...and limit video viewing to once in a while, maybe once per day, 30min limit..who knows....still no bottom icons...gonna restart again....who knows???? also gonna dump half or more of my bookmarks on web surfing in case this is a factor...also delete 50% or so of photos I have downloaded..no music on this or win xp side, no videos, both sides of partionion.
gonna keep on trying.....