Comment 5 for bug 182586

Looks like I'm not alone. I have no "Applications" menu items, although "Places" and "System" are fully populated. I brought about my grief by dist-upgrade UbuntuStudio 7.10 to 8.04. I ran into problems and made me decide to remove ubuntu studio packages till I was able to get Ubuntu-Desktop fully installed.

so I have no Applications menu items.
Tried creating a new user(for a fresh desktop), same thing.
Right click-edit menu, crashs.
alacarte crashs with......
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david@bigfoot:~$ alacarte
/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/apt/progress.py: inconsistent use of tabs and spaces in indentation
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/alacarte", line 36, in <module>
    main()
  File "/usr/bin/alacarte", line 32, in main
    app = MainWindow(datadir, version, sys.argv)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/Alacarte/MainWindow.py", line 49, in __init__
    self.editor = MenuEditor()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/Alacarte/MenuEditor.py", line 36, in __init__
    self.__loadMenus()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/Alacarte/MenuEditor.py", line 44, in __loadMenus
    self.applications.dom = xml.dom.minidom.parseString(util.getUserMenuXml(self.applications.tree))
  File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/Alacarte/util.py", line 197, in getUserMenuXml
    name = tree.root.get_menu_id()
AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'get_menu_id'
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-removed gnome-panel, alacart, menu-xdg gnome-applets, and reinstalled.
-Considering deleting my .gnome2 directory, but realy don't want to loose all my program settings :( and I think making a new user kind of proves this to not work.