application panel do not work

Hy everybody!

I am using Red hat 7.2  on a PC Pentium III.
It was working fine until today. When I enter as root as usual, appeared
this message: "The application "panel" (process 1174) has failed due to a
fatal error (segment violation). Please visit the page GNOME about problems
with the applications".
In effect the panel disappeared.
I make a restart but the same message appeared.

Maybe the cause was I do not stop the services apache and mysql before I
shutdown Red Hat.

Somebody knows how to fix this problem?. You know, working without panel is
difficult, at least to me.