Help! My task bar is missing & none of my FKeys work & neither can I get run command from a right mouse click on the desk top. What do I do to get my task bar back and stop it happening again?

Thanks in advance

Please put your distro in your question or profile and tell us which desktop environment you are using

I'm using Ubuntu Jauty & the desktop environment is an orange/brown desktop

haha! that'll be GNOME

I don't know of any "run" command in Gnome, maybe you accidentally switched your windows manager. If not then you would have to login to the console directly , but since you said that your FN keys aren't working you would have to login to the failsafe session at the login screen. From there you can delete your gnome settings for your user account. Check out this forum post
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=55302

I'm still a linus learner so what do I have to do step by step please?

Thanks

Okay sure.

First of all if your logged into the desktop now and you don't have a bar or anything but the wallpaper you can restart the xserver by hitting CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE. This will most likely make your pc beep really loud and reload the xserver back to the login screen.

At the login screen you should be able to choose your login session type. You should see an options button in the bottom left corner of the login screen. Open this menu and choose failsafe then login to your account. This will open up an xterm window with just a command prompt. If your unable to get to this point you can also open up a standard login terminal by hitting CTRL-ALT-F2 to get to a console.

Either way just make sure you get to a command prompt. Then enter this command "rm -rf .gnome .gnome2 .gconf .gconfd .metacity" in your home directory. This will reset your login screen back to "factory defaults" and will load up like it did when you first installed.

Once you've done this you type exit to leave the command prompt. If you had to do the CTRL-ALT-F2, then you hit CTRL-ALT-F7 to get back to the xserver login. I suggest just rebooting afterwards.

**WARNING** This will remove any Gnome customizations or settings.

In the command line I typed the following to get into the home directory:-
"~ rm -rf .gnome .gnome2 .gconf .gconfd .metacity"
Is that correct?
If so something processed but after re-boot I still don't have a task bar.

Yeah that should reset your desktop if your logging into the standard Ubuntu Gnome interface. Did anything go wrong during the install? Also when I said home directory I was referring to your directory for your user account. So it would be /home/username where username would be the login name your using. Typically the ~ will do the same thing. If that didn't resolve the issue then maybe your Gnome install is messed up. Make sure your really logging into the default session as well. If that still doesn't work I can walk you through reinstalling the desktop interface.

How do I make sure I am logging into the default session?

If your taskbar is missing, you can simply open a terminal and type sudo aptitude reinstall gnome-panel.

I pressed Control-Alt-F2, black screen came up, logged in, gave password and typed the above command. A load files seemed to get removed & then something was 'built' but after re-booting still no task bars.

Sorted! I just typed 'sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop' & re-booted in login. Thanks for all your help everyone.