XFCE Panel Problems, Crashing, Disappearing...

Sometimes I just post things online in order that the information is there to be crawled and indexed by search engines so that people may find it if they happen to be looking for it: it need not be information that's new to the web, duplication of information helps increase the chances of it being found. This little tidbit involves the "XFCE panel" crashing or "disappearing" (as I've seen it 'put'). In later versions of the XFCE desktop environment I have not experienced this behavior, but the XFCE D.E. was created for lower-end and older computers upon which, once installed, is likely to remain on that system for some time without installing new releases.

procedure
The easiest solution to bringing back the XFCE panel is to either right-click the desktop (not any icon on it) to bring-up the desktop menu, and select "terminal" from "Accessories" category of the "Applications" submenu. One can alternatively press the "Alt" button, continue to hold it down, and press "F2"; the convention for shorthand regarding the pressing of key combinations of what I just wrote is "Alt+F2", meaning "Press 'Alt', and then while still holding 'Alt', press 'F2'"; Alt+F2 will initiate a little "Run Program" dialogue box into which is typed

xfce4-terminal

and then press "Enter" or push the onscreen "Run" button to start "Terminal".

When "Terminal" has started, first type the command

killall xfce4-panel

and then press enter. After that type

xfce4-panel

and then press enter. To simplify the whole process, if after several repetetitions of this process as needed the output after the "killall xfce4-panel" command is something like "no process killed" or "no such process found", then the panel is likely not just disappearing, but as a process is altogether shutting off or dying (which may be form an internal bug, or some other conflict with an external process), and if this is the case the user may thereafter skip the terminal altogether by simply pressing Alt+F2, and into that box entering

xfce4-panel

after which "Enter" or the onscreen "Run" button is pressed.


Terms for which people might search include "XFCE panel bar", "XFCE Start Button", "XFCE launcher", "XFCE launcher bar" inter alia(def.).