This is a weird problem I've been facing both in my home PC and college computers...

When I use Software manager of mandrake 9.2 to install few extra packages, most of the start menu items vanish from the panel and I get a message saying : GNOME panel crashed!

I'm pretty sure the problem might be in genereal since I've observed the same thing happening in installations in our college....

Any body know solution to this?

This is a common problem with the newest mandrake release. I have been using 9.2 and only had this problem once. I think there must have been an rpmdrake or rpm package update that fixed this, as I use the update gui regularly w/o the problem returning.

To get the menus back:

update-menus -v

Hit enter after a while, as the command prompt is not restored when the process is finished.

I ran into the same problem with KDE on 2 different computers. The problem is a bug in RPM. You need to update RPM before you install/update any other software. Here are the particulars:

Name: rpm
Version: 4.2-22.1.92mdk
Size: 4819 KB
Relevance: bugfix
Medium: update_source
Installed version:4.2-21mdk

Summary: The RPM package management system
Cause:A bug was found in the way that rpm locks it's database in that it prevents update-menus from running properly and can cause the loss of KDE, GNOME, and other WM menus.

This package provides a better locking mechanism that should prevent this improper behaviour.

Description: RPM is a powerful command line driven package management system capable of installing, uninstalling, verifying, querying, and updating software packages. Each software package consists of an archive of files along with information about the package like its version, a description, etc.


In order to get your menus back, run

update-menus -v

as root. This worked on one of the computers & tried it on but not the other. Good luck.