panel woes

[jgauthier kamikaze whiteboard net]

For some reason, do not know what my session with gnome locked up.
My cursor was still responsive, but i couldn't get any window to take
input. So i had to take down my X session hard. 

once, restarted my panel was completely blank.  Not even the foot menu
existed. No big deal, i can always re-customize it.  However, upon logging
back in it seems that my panel, while loading, when quit does not quit
gnome-session. So when i log out from the panel, everything is still
running, except the panel. What Can I do to fix this?
my .xsession basically looks like this: 
(psuedo)
wmaker &
gnome-session