Just installed Mint 17.1 Cinnamon last night and this morning after moving several applets to the bottom panel, I attempted to separate the group and move the individual applets to various locations on the panel but was unable to do so. I was always able to do this in Mint 13. Has this feature been disabled just in Cinnamon or is Mate the same way?

Not sure about Cinnamon, but Mate (Fedora 21 and Rawhide; Ubuntu 14.10 and what will be 15.04) lets me position panel applets exactly where I want them (and, more importantly, lets me have a bottom panel and a side panel).

Rock Doctor, you're absolutely right about Mate. This morning I booted the PC with the Mate install disk and I placed applets on the panel and was able to place them where ever I wanted to put them. Just to make sure it wasn't something weird about my installation of Cinnamon, I then booted the PC with the Cinnamon disk and as I expected, it's Cinnamon where the problem is. Why they would take away the option to move the applets around I don't know. Well, so be it. I definitely won't be using Cinnamon. But when I installed Mate I ran into another problem. I could not log in. I kept getting a message that I was using the wrong password, but I know that isn't true. But just in case I had made a typo (unlikely since you have to confirm password) I re-installed Mate again, this time typing very carefully with one finger but when I booted the PC I got the same error message about typing the wrong password. I think there is a bug in the installer. Is there any way that I can boot from a live DVD and change the log-in setup? I actually doubt it but I just hate to do the install a third time. By the way, thanks for your post. I think I will post about the password issue. Maybe someone will post an answer before I start the re-install. I'll choose auto-login this time.

Boot a live DVD (doesn't matter which one), mount the HDD partition containing the Mate installation, open a terminal window, chroot to the Mate partition, then use the passwd command to set the password of your Mate user. If you need help with any of the steps, just ask.

RockDoctor, thanks for your post about fixing the login issue. I don't know what the chroot syntax would be and I didn't get any help (at least none that I understood) when I opened a terminal and typed "help chroot". So I'll need some help with that. The rest I am familiar with.

On my computer, if I boot from a live DVD or flash drive, open nemo (the file manager), and click on my Linux Mint partition, that partition is mounted at /media/a/LM17 ("a" is my user name, "LM17" is the partition label). Assuming your Linux Mint user is named "allenM2015" and the mount poit is "LM17" (adjust the code below as appropriate), you would do the following once the Linux Mint partition is mounted:
1. Open a terminal window.
2. Perform the chroot:3. Change the password (you should be prompted for a new password): 4. Get out of the chroot: 5. Reboot (to the hard drive)