no panel

[Randy Bush]

>>>> gnome is VERY slow to start and i get no panel.  so i tried
>>>>   portupgrade -fR x11/XFree86-4-clients
>>>>   portupgrade -fr Xft
>>>> which took a little while <grin>.  still no panel.  but it
>>>> does seem to be trying
>>>> randy    44277  0.0  1.8 13828 9464  ??  Is    4:52AM   0:00.25 gnome-panel --sm-config-prefix /gnome-panel-McgeCy/ --sm-client-id 
>>> i lied.  after about an hour, yes literally an hour, the panel comes up.
>> 
>> and it takes six minutes for a nautilus StartHere window to open.

months later, many rebuilds, reconfigs, ... the problem
persists.  for some reason, i decided to see if it was the
theme.  executing gnome-theme-manager never does anything.
so

    ran.psg.com:/usr/home/randy> gdb gnome-theme-manager 
    ...
    (gdb) run
    Starting program: /usr/X11R6/bin/gnome-theme-manager 
    ...
    ^C(no debugging symbols found)...
    Program received signal SIGINT, Interrupt.
    0x28acc1f4 in __sys_poll () from /usr/lib/libc_r.so.4
    (gdb) back                      
    #0  0x28acc1f4 in __sys_poll () from /usr/lib/libc_r.so.4
    #1  0x28acb6d9 in _thread_kern_sched_state_unlock () from /usr/lib/libc_r.so.4
    #2  0x28acb08e in _thread_kern_scheduler () from /usr/lib/libc_r.so.4
    #3  0x0 in ?? ()

any clues?

randy