I recently installed Xubuntu 6.06. It was running fine on an old compaq. 64MB RAM. 733Mhz intel cpu. After the install everything was working great. I fired up synaptic to make sure all the packages were up to date. I upgraded any that weren't. Looking back on the history it looks like gdm was upgraded along with the kernel and some other things. The next time I booted up the computer a message came up that said "The greeter application appears to be crashing. Attempting to use a different one..." Another greeter comesup in X, but it is a plain greeter rather than a themed one. After logging in, there is no panel. I can still run applications by right-clicking on the desktop.

Any help or suggestions are appreciated.

Issue Resolved!

Since I had just recently installed xubuntu there was not much on the partition besides the base install so I did a quick reformat and installed ubuntu again. Under the login window setup unchecking the box "enable accessible login" stopped gdm from crashing when it is themed. Not sure what caused the panel to disappear, though it may have been related to gdm crashing. Its working fine for me now.