Date/Time not appearing in top panel

[S3KshuN8]

Here is a screenshot... I've rebooted several times and it just isn't there anymore...

I think I just made matters a lot worse by deleting the panel...

Is there a way to get the old one back?

[S3KshuN8]

Well I have good news and bad news...

The bad news is the old panel is history as far as I can tell.
The good news is I've rebuilt a new one with pretty much all of the same stuff I had.

So I guess unless something happens to it again, this matter is closed. Sorry to make a "panic post".

[S3KshuN8]

Now I'm curious as to how the original one got hosed (before I deleted it) and how I might be able to restore the current one, should the same thing happen again. Whatever it was, it managed to happen after a clean reboot so my guess is something in the panel itself.

[S3KshuN8]

Well since I don't have a cat or other pet, mine must have been caused by some form of gremlin. All I know is it was fine until I rebooted, then the gremlin struck. As it turns out, deleting the panel entirely and making a new one from scratch will fix it, but I'd prefer a less drastic alternative.

[S3KshuN8]

Well it happened again... Again, it was fine before I rebooted to back up to my external drive using CloneZilla. It errored out backing up the linux partition, so its possible this is the result of a corrupt file system. I definitely do not want to delete the panel this time so any help is appreciated.

EDIT

Not to sound like a noob, but how do I schedule a disk check? Something is definitely wrong with my linux partition and I don't know how to fix it.

[S3KshuN8]

I remembered that I can check a linux partition with Gparted (boot from CD) it did not find any errors but the third try backing up was the charm, got a good backup and then stored the USB drive away for next time. Upon rebooting the top panel is once again acting screwy...

[S3KshuN8]

It's hard to say what is causing it... At the moment it is working as it should. That may change after the next reboot. My guess is something in the configuration of the panel. All of a sudden, the malfunctioning clock started working, then I was able to remove it. Weird.

[S3KshuN8]

OK I've narrowed down the possibilities a little bit. It seems that if I shut down with the weather showing, the whole clock will be messed up upon reboot. But if I uncheck weather from the clock preferences first, then it is fine on reboot and I can add the weather back.
(This is based on one try, mind you. Rebooting is boring.)

EDIT

Make that 2 tries. The weather feature of the clock appears to be the source of my gremlin. As long as I turn those off before shutting down or rebooting, the clock works fine after rebooting and I can turn the weather back on manually. I have no idea why, or how to fix it.

[Acaster]

Something similar happened in earlier versions. The fix at the time was to put the following in a text file on your desktop, name it restorepanels and make it executable and if the panels don't appear run it

#!/bin/bash
gconftool-2 --shutdown
rm -rf ~/.gconf/apps/panel
pkill gnome-panel