Running F11 & Gnome desktop

ok, so I managed to hose my system. It all started when I couldn't get audio to play through the aux input, even though it worked in F10.
Eventually I managed to kill audio completely after a reinstall of pulse and alsa I got audio working again,
but I also had to re-installl gdm and gnome desktop and various apps.

Now Several desktop apps don't have menu bars.

Firefox was easy to fix with a simple update, but...
My latest task is to get evolution to display the menu bar.

I already tried uninstalling, and reinstalling in addition to evolution-data-server.

no luck

then it dawned on me to try to force a reconfig by renaming the .evolution folder.

no luck

can someone suggest a few more things to try?