GNOME Panel problems

"3" happens to me, too, but when I add a launcher to the panel. The launcher's icon appear to the left and makes the "List of windows" desappear. If one moves the launcher to the right, the list of windows is visible again. But this is a serious thing, in my opinion, specially for new users.

Yes, it's definitely problematic for inexperienced users. I've used GNU/Linux for a couple of years now and the solution for #3 was still a new one on me.

#2 can be manually fixed by adding gnome-volume-control-applet to the Startup Applications.

I have two panels, one top and one bottom. I lost the bottom one altogether after upgrading.

I tried to kill gnome-panel but only the top one came back. Yet, at some point, the bottom panel was suddenly there last session. Now it's gone again. Interesting.

Fixed in the current updater script.

To take back to default your panel run

gconftool --recursive-unset /apps/panel

To do it for all the users (as long as their home is not encrypted) run

for user in root $(grep /home/ /etc/passwd |egrep -v '(false|nologin)$'| cut -d: -f1)
do 
   sudo -u $user gconftool --recursive-unset /apps/panel
done

Closing

This script will work better

#This loop takes back the panel configuration to the default settings
export LANG=C
for user in root $(grep /home /etc/passwd |egrep -v '(false|nologin)$'| cut -d: -f1)
do
    if [ -f /home/$user/.dbus/session-bus/$(cat /var/lib/dbus/machine-id)-0 ]
    then
        DBUS_SESSION=$(grep -v "^#" /home/$user/.dbus/session-bus/$(cat /var/lib/dbus/machine-id)-0)
        sudo -u $user $DBUS_SESSION gconftool --recursive-unset /apps/panel 2>&1 | grep -q "Connection refused"
        if [ $? = 0 ]
        then
            sudo -u $user gconftool --recursive-unset /apps/panel
            sudo -u $user gconftool --shutdown
        fi
    else
        sudo -u $user gconftool --recursive-unset /apps/panel
        sudo -u $user gconftool --shutdown
    fi
done

I used this last script but I still get problem #3 when I add the launchers to the panel again.