G'day,

It has been my impression that the gnome-panel's main menu is based on
info in files in /usr/share/applications. However there are items in my
menus (for example, other/kate and other/kwrite) without files and
there are files without entries (for example, virtualbox.desktop).

I've tried 'killall gnome-panel' to force a restart and, hopefully,
rebuild the menu tree. The panel did restart, but the menus didn't
update and my icons for editor, mail, and browser were b0rked -- not
what I wanted!

Also, looking in ebuilds I've found menu and desktop related
directives, like "make_desktop_entry ..." and "doins ... desktop", but
sometimes /usr/share/applications doesn't have a corresponding entry.

Can somebody please explain how the gnome main menu is built, where it
resides, and how to force a rebuild?

Thanks.

David