Ok, for a while now (since the summer and it was dearly hot) I have been running the Hardware Sensor Monitor applet so I can glance up and see what the mean temperatures are of my system components. I didn't want to have a literal meltdown.
So, I think this applet isn't playing nice with other items, specifically my Wally wallpaper changer. On the last Ubuntu update (circa mid Oct 2011) something changed where the Sensor monitor and Wally collided. Rebooting didn't help. Deleting the applets and re-adding them to the panel seemed like the best bet.
Delete worked fine, re-adding gets sticky. Seems there is no Wally applet to readd, it just gets placed there at application startup. Uninstall and reinstall this application. No good. Remove the configuration directory ~/.wally and restart application. Still no good. It is doing its thing, switching wallpapers, but I no longer have a way to adjust the preferences or push it to fetch a new picture.
Here is the solution that seems to be working well for me.
First I removed the hardware monitor sensor applet, since its going into winter I can probably be safe to assume the ambient temperatures will not cause my system too hot.
Second I reset the Gnome panel system. Not as scary as it sounds.
Do the following (on Ubuntu 10.10, not sure what will happen if and when I finally update to 11.x)
1 - open a terminal window.
2 - shutdown and remove the gnome panel system. (Top and bottom panels will disappear)
gconftool --recursive-unset /apps/panel
3 - Clear out the old panel configurations
rm -rf ~/.gconf/apps/panel
4 - send a term signal to restart the panel system
pkill gnome-panel
Both top and bottom panels reappeared and the missing Wally applet was there again. I had to re-add my favorite quick launches for Chrome and Terminal, but that's a small price to pay.
