I had Mandriva 2008 installed and running fine for about a day.
Suddenly my KDE panel disappeared.
I had it placed at the bottom of my desktop and set to go into hide mode.
Now whenever I start a session I get a quick flash of the panel but placing my cursor at
the bottom does not bring the panel back.
What should I do ?


[moved from Software by spinynorman]

Unhide it (Control Centre==> Desktop--> Panels--> Hiding tab) and use the left or right hiding function instead. There's also the Raise when the pointer touches the screen's: function.

Just a quick reminder: In Linux systems, the files that define your user-desktop layout and behaviour are some hidden files in your /home/user/ directory, e.g. .kde, .gnome, .qt, .gtk and so forth. When you activate "show hidden files" view in your filebrowser, you will see that there are several hidedn user-configuration files.

In case that you wreck your desktop (no panels, weird window decorations, wrong file associations, etc.) you can simply rename (in case there is valuable data stored somewhere) or remove (in case there is no important data to backup) the hidden files. The system will then, if you log in again, create a default desktop configuration with fresh config-files(= revert the desktop to its basic settings).

In case you're wondering how to access the KDE control without a panel:
Simply hit alt+F2 and then "kcontrol"

Thanks for all the help.
With these various tips I was able to set things straight.