Comment 29 for bug 349237

I also have received this error. No applets have loaded in the panel, and I have a bunch of messages such as the following:

The panel encountered a problem while loading "OAFIID:GNOME_NotificationAreaApplet".

In addition, when I try to reinstall the 'indicator-applet' program (as some have indicated might resolve the issue), I get the following error:

Original exception was:
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/sbin/gconf-schemas", line 7, in <module>
    from optparse import OptionParser
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/optparse.py", line 77, in <module>
    from gettext import gettext
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/gettext.py", line 49, in <module>
    import locale, copy, os, re, struct, sys
EOFError: EOF read where object expected
dpkg: error processing indicator-applet (--configure):
 subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 1
Errors were encountered while processing:
 indicator-applet
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

-Ray