Lost all use of the bottom panel on my desktop

Support & Help Requests
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1

Hello,

The bottom panel on my desktop is visible but nothing else shows up there, even when applications are open.

I’m fairly new to Linux and Mate especially.
I’m using Mate 16.04 with the latest updates.
I’m having a problem with the desktop.

Everything was working fine last week. I put my machine to sleep/suspend while I was out of town for several days.

When I got back and woke the machine this morning. Everything started up, but seemed to take much longer.
I have Psensor running and it starts up on login. The video card temp was way high.
Also, the bottom desktop panel was full of icons that, when I checked the properties, said they were “Multiple Desktop Switching”
I found the running process and killed it.
That solved the problem for the moment, but when I logged out and back in, I got the same result.

So, I tried updating everything and fixed any package problems.

After that, I can get into the desktop with no problems except…

The mouse pointer, when not hovering over a runnning app, is in busy mode (always).
When I run an app, it does not show up on the bottom panel anymore, nothing does. It’s visible, but that’s it.

I’ve tried googling to see if anyone has had a similar problem. I found people with the same problem I started with on
older builds, but not 16.04.
I couldn’t find the identical problem I’m currently having, since updating everything.

Does anyone have an Idea what I can do to get things back to normal again, barring reinstall? I haven’t tried reinstalling the Mate desktop yet.

Thanks in advance for looking at my post. Any suggestions are welcome.

The hardware I’m running on is the following:
Dell XPS 430
CPU: Intel Core2 Quad Q8300
Memory: 8 GB
HDD: 700+ GB
Video: ATI Radeon HD 3870

Nothing special, but it has worked fine up till now. :slight_smile

2

Hi
Please try and use MATE Tweak to reset your panel layout to one of the default ones (such as Ubuntu MATE) and see if it helps.

3

ouroumov,

Thanks for your suggestion.
Tweak wasn’t the solution, but has given me more things to play with!

I did find the immediate problem though.

A while back, Caja was causing me some grief. I decided to remove it and use another file browser. I got frustrated with that app, so after some time I decided to add Caja back in.

Once Caja was installed, the problems started, and when I removed it, the problems went away.

I don’t know why Caja has been such a pain. Probably a configuration mess up. I guess that’s another problem to work on.

Again, thanks for your willingness to help. It is much appreciated.

P.S. Sorry it has taken so long to get back to you, to let you know what happened. Work has been crazy, and I’ve been pulling double shifts. Sleep is a luxury. :slight_smile:

Cheers!