[SOLVED] Gnome panel disappeared!

[daik]

Today I updated my Mandriva 2008.1 system installing all updates (not that many, mostly kde updates). I then proceeded to fiddle to get my microphone to work. I got that to work by changing some settings in the mixer (the gnome mixer).
After I reboot and log back in my desktop appears as normal. My gnome panel shows up with one launcher on it, and then a second later it disappears altogether! Nothing I do can bring it back. I try opening a terminal (gnome-terminal) and run gnome-panel, the first times I got a message about allocating a width of -1, I uninstalled the packages I had installed during the day, and now that message has disappeared but I can still not get a menu! I did not add anything to the menu, or panel.
HELP ME! What do I need to do to get my gnome panel back?!
(kde seem to be working fine).
I created a new user to test if default gnome would work, but same thing happens there.

UPDATE: It seems the panel does not stop at the same place every time. Sometimes I see all the menues and all my custom launchers ever so briefly. Other times it just comes up as a white line before it goes away.

[daik]

KDE is still working as expected. I tried to uninstall gnome-panel (and the dep task-gnome-minimal). And then reinstalling it from the DVD, this did not help.
I changed back the setting I changed in the sound mixer, this did not change anything either. I am very frustrated now!
Is there any way I can rollback the updates I installed? I think I have uninstalled most of them, but uninstalling may not be a good idea (?) Any logs I can look in to give me an idea of what is going on?

Gnome seems to be working normally, except I have no panel, and thus no menues or startup. Any suggestions on how to proceed?

[daik]

I just recieved word from expert.mandriva.com. It seems it is the timezone update in the latest batch of updates that broke gnome. So they recommend the following
rpm -Uvh --force
http://spout.ussg.indiana.edu/linux/...008.1.i586.rpm

and

rpm -Uvh --force
http://spout.ussg.indiana.edu/linux/...008.1.i586.rpm
(adjust mirrors and package names accordingly).
According to the poster he uses rpm rather than urpmi because he couldn't find out how to force an install with urpmi. I have not tried this yet but several people claim success with it.

[daik]

I have now tried this and I can confirm this did indeed fix my Gnome. So advice is to stay away from the this timezone update if you run Gnome.