I don't know if I am doing something structurally wrong here, but about a year ago I had a play with Zenwalk as this distro runs really well with low specs computers. Then I was using version 5.2 and now I have installed the latest version on an old Acer P3 1ghz 256mb laptop and the same problem occurs that I had a year ago: all of a sudden I log in and the panels/taskbars are missing and will not come back.

I have tried what was suggested here and here (post #5).

when I do a right click on the desktop I can get to the section where you can go to configuring the panel, but nothing happens when I click on that. I am not entirely familiar with netpackage and Zendo but from what I can see the required packages are all installed (as per default).

has anyone had this problem and a fix for it?
thanks in advance.

I didn't really got your problem, but if it's just that the xfce panel doesn't launch, couldn't you type xfce-panel (or something like that, which will launch the panel) in your terminal and save your session like that?

when I type the command 'xfce4-panel' I get the following response:

no idea how this happens as I have not really changed much to the system just yet.

well, giving stfw a try it yield this results: http://support.zenwalk.org/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=22797
it's apparently related to your distro, it said it was solved by "upgrading GTK+2 to 2.16.0 - build 60.1", so I guess you may want to try upgrading/reinstalling gtk.

will give that a try and report back here, thanks.

that seemed to have fixed it! thanks.