I have experienced a very similar situation, which seems to me to be the same bug as this, on the Natty daily-live CD. I've reported it as bug 742143 (which I've since marked as a duplicate of this bug). There are additional details in that bug report.
** Tags added: natty -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Desktop Bugs, which is subscribed to gnome-panel in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/642877 Title: Gnome-panel doesn't start upon login -- desktop-bugs mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/desktop-bugs
