On FC6 - Folks, I understand the need for brevity, here, also the need for completeness if you aim to get any help. I will try to do both. This AM we had a new kernel, and some other things. I rebooted, after 19 days uptime, and when X started, I had NO PANELS except for a tiny one at the top, with a few icons. It wont stretch out, I can't do anything with it. Now, this is NOT related to the updates. How do I know? Let's call that the primary drive, and I also have FC6 on a secondary drive. I plugged it in, updated, and it was fine. But, it is months behind on email, letters, stuff I have done. I want primary BACK. Now, here's the only clue I see. When X starts, there's a window that says, "Power Manager error, Battery low cannot be 0% Gconfd schema could not be loaded." Or something to that effect. Looking on the secondary drive, there's a .gconfd in my home dir, containing "saved_state", an ascii file that makes no sense to me. Can I move that to the failed drive? What about moving all of the .gconf, which contains: .gconf:
apps desktop GNOME schemas system
What about moving .gnome-vfs .gnome2, and .gnome-private. Should I even TRY any of this? I do have a 1 month old backup, but I don't know what to get off of that. HELP?????
Thanks, Ray

.gconf contains all the configuration for your gnome desktop. Try moving that directory from the secondary drive. Alternately, you could delete the .gconf folder, log back out, and when you login, your desktop will be restored to the default fedora setup.

You will lose all your email configuration, but not the messages (they are stored in .evolution). You will get everything back when you redo the setup in the evolution wizard.

Thank you, sir. I will be doing exactly that this AM.
Please cross fingers and toes.

Well, shuckdarn. THAT didn't work at all. BUT! There are some more clues. After totally replacing .gconf from the secondary drive, I got the same exact screen, and same message. No panels, except that 1" wide thing.
NOW, I notice there's no nautilus icon, for file management. But, nautilus IS running in the ps list.
Significant: I made a brand new user, did a startx, and HE got the same screen I do. A mess. I don't have any idea where to go from here? HELP!?!?!?!??!?

Further along.... A locate finds /etc/gconf and about a zillion entries in "schemas". I maoved all of those from the working drive to the nonworking, with no change whatsoever. Well, it was jusr something to try, I suppose.
I am getting the hint that nautilus not appearing on the desktop may be important, although it is running. I open a terminal, and it looks grossly large, fonts and all, and I can't get shift-conttrol-T to open another tab. Hmmm.

It's fixed. BUT! I have no idea what was broken. I pulled several top level dirs from my backup DVD, rebooted, all "seems" perfect, (preliminary, of course).