Hello, all. Horrendous problem here that I'm hoping someone can help me solve.

The principal players: Mandrake 9.2, KDE 3.1.3, RPMDrake.

Every second or third time I install a new package, a bunch of stuff disappears from my KDE "K"/Start Applications menus. I found that simply repositioning the panel (from the bottom to, say, the right side) fixed the problem.

Tonight, I installed something and discovered that well over half of my menu entries are gone. Even the category icons are missing, and most of the sub-categories.

The vanishment persists through restarts of KDE and reboots of the entire system. GNOME is similarly affected. It may or may not mean anything that fluxbox has everything where it should be, with the exception of one top-level menu item.

Can anyone tell me what's happening, how to fix it, and/or prevent it from happening again? Is there a config file that I should be prepared to back up & restore every time I install an RPM?

Any guidance would be greatly appreciated-- I simply don't know enough of the correct filenames to launch my missing applications from the command line. Thanks very much in advance.

update-menus -v

try that command from the command line as root. It should get all your menu entries back.

As for knowing the correct names of commands they are normally something very close to what was on the menu. A feature i've found quite helpfull in linux is the auto finish feature. If you don't know the whole command or app name you can type in what you know and hit the 'tab' button to auto complete the rest. If there is more than one wat to finish it will give the list of possibles. Great feature if your like me and go "I know that command starts with an 'g'....."

Thanks, pzatch. As it turns out, someone elsewhere suggested that I open the Menu Editor and hit Save; I'm guessing that this is at least the functional GUI equivalent of the command you gave. I'll try yours next time.

Thanks for reminding me about autocomplete-- I can hardly believe I forgot that.