I have loaded Xubuntu on a friend's old clunker and it seems to run
well. However, when playing around with it (I have used Unbuntu with
Gnome for years but have never used Xubuntu
or xfce before) I managed to make the panel disappear.
I Googled the problem and found the solution: run the command
xfce4-panel in a terminal. But that does not work - I get the error
"Floating point exception" and, although the panel flashes at me a few
times, I get back to where i was.
There is a "Panel" menu item under Applications - Settings but it does
not do anything.
I created a new user and its panel works fine. It is just the original user :-(