Hi, I ran into the same problem and using Filippo's debugging suggestion found that cpufreq kernel drivers were not loaded (for some strange reason it stopped loading them by default). If drivers are not loaded then /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/ interface is absent, which in turn results in cpufreq applet not being able to read the cpufreq information ((cpufreq-applet:7356): GLib-GObject-WARNING **: value "-1" of type `gint' is invalid or out of range for property `max-frequency' of type `gint').
To fix this problem I loaded the drivers manually (as root): modprobe acpi-cpufreq modprobe cpufreq-ondemand modprobe cpufreq-userspace (one can add these modules into /etc/modules to load them automatically during boot) After drivers were loaded, the cpufreq-applet suddenly appeared on the panel. I would suggest to fix this applet to not rely on kernel cpufreq interface (such debug messages should not be handled gracefully) and if the interface is missing the applet should still appear but perhaps with a hint that the cpufreq driver/interface is missing. I also noticed that cpufreq-applet has a very cute help, which could actually include steps on how to enable the cpufreq interface in the kernel, or refer to a piece of software (udev? /etc/modules?) that is responsible for that, it is really easy after all. On the other hand, if you think that the drivers should have been loaded automagically in the first place (by udev/hotplug/whatever), then it might be not a gnome-applets bug... Best regards, Marius Mikučionis
