Comment 6 for bug 537383

I'm able to reproduce this issue with the 2010-03-21 Lucid Ubuntu LiveCD i386 image.

The symptom is that on starting the Gnome desktop shows with a couple of icons but there are no panels and therefore no menus or notificaition area, taskbar, etc. From tty1 doing "sudo service gdm restart" works correctly and the panels and menus, applet icons all show up.

The live session .xsession-errors shows:

** (gnome-panel:2384): WARNING **: panel-applet-frame.c:1310: failed to get Bonobo/Control interface on applet OAFIID:GNOME_IndicatorApplet:
Unknown CORBA exception id: 'IDL:omg.org/CORBA/COMM_FAILURE:1.0'

** (gnome-panel:2384): WARNING **: panel-applet-frame.c:1310: failed to get Bonobo/Control interface on applet OAFIID:GNOME_FastUserSwitchApplet:
Unknown CORBA exception id: 'IDL:omg.org/CORBA/COMM_FAILURE:1.0'

** (gnome-panel:2384): WARNING **: panel-applet-frame.c:1310: failed to get Bonobo/Control interface on applet OAFIID:GNOME_NotificationAreaApplet:
Unknown CORBA exception id: 'IDL:omg.org/CORBA/COMM_FAILURE:1.0'

checking for processes that reference CORBA IDs shows:

ps -ef | grep OAF
ubuntu 2534 1 0 18:59 ? 00:00:00 /usr/lib/gnome-panel/wnck-applet --oaf-activate-iid=OAFIID:GNOME_Wncklet_Factory --oaf-ior-fd=18
ubuntu 2535 1 0 18:59 ? 00:00:00 /usr/lib/gnome-applets/trashapplet --oaf-activate-iid=OAFIID:GNOME_Panel_TrashApplet_Factory --oaf-ior-fd=24
ubuntu 2561 1 0 18:59 ? 00:00:01 /usr/lib/gnome-panel/clock-applet --oaf-activate-iid=OAFIID:GNOME_ClockApplet_Factory --oaf-ior-fd=28