Heres my prob. I use RH7.3, and i used the redhat updater utility to download all of the patches available to me. I then downloaded the loki game demos. After this i shut down my system and booted into my windows patition. when i started up linux again i had to run fsck and it found problems and fixed them. next i loaded gnome and my panel wasnt there (i think thats what it's called, "start menue lookin' thing"). Also, the maximize, capsize and cloze buttons are gone from the top of every window and i cannot move the windows around. The panel does start up and then immediately closes when after booting up. .... with some investigation i have found that sawfish isn't running, when i use a terminal to type sawfish the panel pops up but no programs will launch. i don't want to wipe my system and re-load linux again.
* is there any way that i can run the linux install from within linux and fix the corrupted files
* also, could there be some setting that was triggered to close sawfish?
* and finally, if the updates are the problem, can i uninstall the updates and see if the system works... if so how.

Well, this seems kind of weird. Why don't you try running the pannel manually. And then, switch from sawfish to something else. See if it fixes the windows. Then go back to sawfish to see if it's back to normal. then save session and reboot.
When you rebooted into windows, did you do a hardreboot? or did you boot properly?, because sometimes that'll mess with your configuration. Also, is your linux partition ext3? or ext2?, how come you ran fsck?, some more info may help.

zLinuxz

i ran fsck because i was told to by linux

my linux drive is ext3

i did reboot to windows properly

thanks

I think i know why i had to use fsck, my system has two hard drives one with win one with lin and i had to do a hard reboot while using windows, really i dont know why this would corrupt linux any ideas?

ehmm, I have a similar setup as to having two hardrives, but if Windows crashes and I have to do a hard reboot has never affected my other hardrive with Linux on. What could've happened is that your Linux hardrive might's had a some physica crash or something like a head crash...eventhough that kind of thing would be not common at all and if it did happen would be pretty much fatal for your hardrive. It is however weird why it wanted to use fsck if you did not do a hardreboot and shutted down Linux properly...