Comment 12 for bug 439815

I had to remove pulseaudio because it's been very unstable and started giving me kernel dumps on Karmic. Therefore I had to remove it and got a similar problem.
Not only I do not see the volume applet. Quite a few applets like pidgin,tomboy, stardict, ekiga, linphone, nm are all gone on GNOME for me now (left upper corner)
Interestingly, these applets show up when called on the fluxbox !
I might have to report a separate bug too