It’s been doing it for several versions now. It has done it here on more than one lot of hardware. It’s quite possibly a silly bug lurking somewhere. I’m talking about the case of the disappearing top menu items – generally the Ubuntu Logo main menu icon and the Applications Places System menu text all disappear leaving a thinly populated top menu bar. It only happens every few months but it’s very frustrating when it does happen. Other people have experienced this too – probably too many!

Several people seem to believe that it was something they did. However having witnessed the problem happen again in a reasonably sober state I’m pretty sure that it was a wayward process that triggered it. On this last occasion it was an FTP to a rough connection summarily closing a desktop window. I then tried a reboot, then several supposed fixes, all to no avail. After further digging around I discovered a working solution to restoring the status quo on Saifur Rahman’s website. See my notes on his blog.

You expect this sort of thing on Windoze, but on a rock solid OS like Linux even being forced to reboot after a software update comes as a bit of a downer, and also a chore. So seeing parts of the desktop anatomy disappear before your very eyes is quite memorable.

If/when it happens again I will dig deeper and try to document the problem more thoroughly.