OK, here's what happens: I log in, and Gnome comes up, but instead of the usual panels, I just have mostly blank grey bars on the top and bottom of the screen. The only thing there is the "show desktop" button in the lower left corner. Right-clicking on the panels doesn't do anything.

Since I can't run programs from the panel launchers, I open a terminal and type "firefox", and there are no error messages, but it doesn't come up. My guess is that it's running, because I don't get a new command prompt, but it doesn't appear on the screen because of the problems with Gnome.

All of this happens when I log in with my personal account. If I log in as root, everything works normally. I should add that my personal account is on a network server, whereas the root account is of course on the local computer.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,
g

All(or most) the gnome user specific settings are stored in ~/.gconf
so You can try and remove it(don't forget to backup it first just in case) . This should reset the gnome-panel (and the rest of gnome) settings
it's a drastic way to do it. You can also try launching the gconf-editor form your user account and try to figure out
where the settings went wrong but i guess it will take a lot of time.
hope it will help

Thanks for the suggestion, but I tried removing .gconf (and for good measure, all the other hidden files in the ~ folder), and the problem still happened.

Maybe this is another clue: The first time I log in after booting up, what I described before happens (blank grey bars instead of the usual panels). The second time I log in, I get a message saying something like "Another panel is already running. I am going to close now". Then no bars at all, just the desktop background and icons.

Any idea? I know when I log in it creates a new .gconf, is there a master .gconf somewhere that it copies from? Maybe that master configuration is corrupt?

I had the same problem. It seemed to start with gnome locking-up when I was adding an applet to the panel.

The "fix" worked pretty well for me (I knew better than to delete dot-files indiscriminately).

Of course I'm still reconfiguring the panel to how I like, but at least I'm not doing everything via a terminal anymore