[solved] mate-panel crashes on startup

[munizao]

Using Linux Mint 14, 64bit.

Recently I did a fair bit of customization of the MATE panel, adding a second panel and a whole bunch of applets, including an applet that I wrote myself. (For all I know it could be doing something broken, but that doesn't seem to excuse the problems I'm having.)

Now mate-panel doesn't load upon rebooting my system. When I load it manually from a terminal, I get:

(mate-panel:4425): MateComponent-Activation-CRITICAL **: matecomponent_activation_query: assertion `ac != NULL' failed
Segmentation fault

Things I've tried:

rm -r ~/.config/mate

mate-panel --reset

I notice that /apps/panel in mateconf-editor still seems to be populated with information that seems to come from my old setup. So I tried

mateconftool-2 --recursive-unset /apps/panel

But it doesn't appear to have changed anything at all in mateconf-editor, so I dunno.

According to the thread at viewtopic.php?f=206&t=122459 I should try to remove the directory "~/.mateconf/apps/panel". This did not exist when I looked.

Stumped now.

[munizao]

Oops. This turned out to be my own stupidity. In the process of working on the panel applet that I'm writing, I had installed a .server file which was evidently malformed. Deleting the file fixed the problem. There is still a legitimate bug here: that shouldn't make the panel crash. But it is not a bug that very many users are going to run into.