im running ubuntu 11.04 and seem to have unity and gnome both running
on top of each other. how can i turn off gnome?

Could you describe the symptoms in more detail and let us know what you've tried? This seems most unusual. Which desktop environment is selected in the login screen?

Perhaps a screenshot would help also.

This is a shot in the dark, but if you haven't tried it, log out, select a different desktop environment from either, and log back in, then log out and test. If that doesn't help, reboot, and try again, and report back.

The more information you provide, the easier it will be for someone to come up with some good suggestions.

Well, I think Unity in 11.04 is based off of Gnome 2.32, so is like Gnome Shell, only older. Because of this, it still needs Gnome as it is based on it, that is why it is running.

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This is basically what I think is happening although I'm not sure which version of Gnome Unity runs on top of.

Basically Unity is the top layer, that is what you see as a "desktop", but Gnome supplies everything else so some of Gnome is there.

Well done, ThatPerson and k3lt01. I should have thought of that. Thanks for teaching me something.

my dashboard shows both one on top of the other so that u can hardly read them. only unity works as it seams to be on top. the main prob is upper dashboard is hard to read!

i have rebooted choosen classic , nothing changes!

Frank you are most welcome

jhblaikie, when you say dashboard do you mean the desktop? If you do try uninstalling some parts of Gnome, if you don't want gnome to be visible, such as gnome-panel. Could you list what parts of Gnome are actually installed.

its the top of screen mnu ....applications places system weather etc. that are underneath the unity ones

That menu is in gnome-panel so if you uninstall gnome-panel the issue should disappear. The other thing you could do is click, right or left I can't remember sorry, on the panel itself and then click delete on the pop-up menu that appears. That will delete the panel and hopefully also fix the problem. I would try deleting it from the screen before uninstalling it because Unity may use parts of it, even though there seems to be some conflict, and uninstalling it may cause Unity to crash.