I have had debian up and running for a few days. Nearly all is fine but one annoying problem with the gnome desktop. The main panel (at the top of the screen) has suddenly decided to right justify everything and put the main menus in the middle of icons I have added.

Is there anything I can do about this? I have seen suggestions about deleting the entire .gnome directory in my home directory but this seems a bit drastic. Surely I will lose heaps of other settings as well?

Any help appreciated.

TIA

I think you can right click on an empty section of the panel, and choose 'preferences' from there. There probably is an option somewhere in the GNOME menu.
If neither of hose work, there probably is a configuration file you can edit by hand - almost everything has one.
If you delete your entire /.gnome directory you will loose all of your GNOME settings, but not application settings. Actually, you probably with some or all applications that are integrated or come with GNOME.

Edit: didn't see that you were using Debian; your profile says Red Hat 7. You might also be able to reinstall GNOME without purging the configuration files, and it might be fixed, especially if it a bug and not an intentional setting.

bp12345

Thanks for taking the time out to reply. I finally chose to delete the .gnome directory. Lost quite a few things but it was worth it as I got my original desktop back and just had to add a few things back.

The annoying thing was that I found it was caused when debian rebooted with the wrong screen resolution - no reason - I hadn't changed anything. It just did it as these things do. The net result was that when i booted again and chose the correct resolution, the applications and desktop menu were stubbornly offset to the right where the lower res screen had them!! Ah well you live and learn ... (sometimes with linux I feel i just live!!)