Ubuntu 9.1 The first transgression

Ok so using Ubuntu 9.1 and it was going pretty smoothy til I tried to auto hide one of the panels, after which the OS froze. This was pretty annoying but not as annoying as what happened next:

I rebooted and logged in only to get stuck at the Ubuntu splash screen! I figured that something had gone awry with the gnome settings so I searched for how to reset the Gnome settings from the command line as no GUI was available. Found the following:

# rm -rf .gnome .gnome2 .gconf .gconfd .metacity

source

Used the recovery kernel mode from grub to get to the console and entered the command, rebooted and voila. However that is a pretty harsh penalty for trying to auto hide one panel!