Comment 9 for bug 164804

I'm adding information here in case it may help in determining the cause of the problem:

This morning one of our Samba networked Ubuntu computers had the error message:

[QUOTE]"Error: The panel encountered a problem while loading "OAFIID: Gnome_fastuserswitchapplet". Do you want to delete the applet from your configuration?"[/QUOTE]

The workstation is a plain vanilla Ubuntu 7.10 i386 install which has been working for about a month. No updates have been applied yet. The stock desktop is used. It is networked with Samba. Two users are installed on this workstation.

One major network change was instituted last night -- we went from DHCP to static IPs. Systems were tested last night and the network was functional. This is a home network with a dialup connection, and we turn the network (workstations router and modem) off when not in use.

A nautilus bookmark exists on the problem workstation for a Samba shared file folder on another workstation.

When the workstation was started this morning, the routers and modem were turned off, as was the computer with the shared Samba file.

The error message appeared twice after two hard reboots. It appeared about a minute after the desktop was up.

A third attempt at booting was succesful and did not show the error message -- the router, modem, and shared folder workstation had been started BEFORE the reboot.

I'm wondering whether this problem is related to STATIC configured networks which are unresponsive, or unconnected.

I notice some additional evidence here (static IP, network non-functional, same error message):

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=632755