If you recently did an emerge to the brand new gnome 2.16 in gentoo, then, maybe you have some troubles with the deskbar applet, so after digging a little bit with strace i found a temporary fix: Edit file defs.py in /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/deskbar: DATA_DIR = "/usr/share" LIB_DIR = "/usr/lib" VERSION = "2.16.0" PACKAGE = "deskbar-applet" PYTHONDIR = "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages" And change DATA_DIR, to your data directory, in my case, /usr/share, so when deskbar start's it will find /usr/share/deskbar-applet and it's files. That's all