Resetting gnome-panel in ubuntu
While trying to customize the gnome panel on ubuntu I lost access to the panel (after enabling the auto-hide feature). After trying several things to reset the gnome panel to its original setting (or disable the auto-hide), nothing brought the panel back. Finally, figured out a way to reset everything to the factory defaults for the gnome-panel with a single command:
gconftool-2 --recursive-unset /apps/panel
Also restarted the gnome-panel by killing it from the command prompt
killall gnome-panel