I've recently had an issue with Mandriva not booting properly, and now that issue is sorted but now I have another issue. There is a small gap between my open window and the panel at the bottom. It shows my desktop wallpaper, and if I right-click on the space, it comes up with the same menu as if I was right-clicking on the panel. Also, the icons on the panel are overlapping onto the desktop. Anybody know how I could fix/work around this?

Thanks.

Two things come to mind:
First, go into ~/.kde or ~/.kde4 and locate the config files for the panel, or for plasma, and try renaming them to something else. Log out and then back in. KDE will generate new default configs, and maybe this in itself will fix the issue.

The quicker version of that is to rename your entire ~/.kde directory and then lag out and back in. This will force KDE to fall back onto a default config in every way. That should really fix the issue; but then you have to rebuild any customisations you had (and kmail), so this method might be overkill.