Mint 7 Gloria messed up after metacity uninstall

[rldev]

I uninstalled metacity and now my Mint 7 is in shambles. I have no start bar, video settings are out of whack. I had to reinstall metacity to get any semblance of a desktop back. But now I have no mint start bar. Not sure what the best course f action is now. Can I install Mint on top of this installation? If so, would I lose my home dir, virtualbox, etc?

[clhodapp]

I'm pretty sure that this should be fixable. Are there no panels at the top or bottom of your screen?

[rldev]

I'm pretty sure that this should be fixable. Are there no panels at the top or bottom of your screen?

There are panels. Just no mintLauncher and video is screwed up,

[clhodapp]

If you have a panel, you should be able to right click it, say "Add to Panel.." and add a mintmenu.

[rldev]

No I tried that already. There is no mintmenu, it is as if it were removed from the system.

[clhodapp]

Can you hit alt+f1 and use that menu to open a terminal, type "apt purge mintmenu", then type "apt install mintmenu". Then do another "Add to panel".