Comment 6 for bug 765794

After upgrading to Natty, I encountered this exact same problem when I logged into Classic Mode (since Unity sadly only displays a transparent top bar and no launcher). Oli's fix helped for some things, but as he mentioned, the clock applet doesn't work. Also, I've found that while this gets the old notification area up and running, the indicator applets still do not appear.
And I certainly never messed with any of the configuration files.