am i the only one who's panel keeps crashing?
No. Same experience here on a HP zd7000 notebook and on my desktop. And I cannot see any common hardware between these two machines.
it happens very often
Here too, but I cannot figure out a pattern, and there is nothing in the logs which I - as a non-techie - would connect to the crashes.
i've been trying to figure out the cause. so far i think is nautilus.
nautilus is crashing as well every now and then and the desktop icons disappear (but that's happened only once to me, and nautilus was just showing funny trees - e.g. missing out the filesystem tree at all).
After restarting gnome, everything is fine again - well, till the next weird gnome-panel crash.
-- Regards Markus Huber