I accidentally deleted the GNOME bar while messing around with it. I could have rebuilt it by hand, applet by applet, but I thought that there must be some way to reset it back to the default. It turns out that this is a pretty straight forward thing to do.

In the /etc/xdg/menus folder are the templates for the default menus. The one we are interested in is "applications.menu.orig.dpkg-new".

Simply copy this file to your /home/<usr_id>/.config/menus/ directory and then rename it to "applications.menu"

I got this tip from the following forums:
http://forum.ubuntu-fr.org/viewtopic.php?id=199923
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=335675

I built and installed the latest kernel (2.6.28 as of this writing) and attempted to install the proprietary nvidia driver with this kernel. The nvidia installer (version 177.82) did not detect the kernel headers that were in fact installed.

What I had to do was to extract the installation files from the nvidia installer (you do this with the -x flag). Then I had to apply a patch that I found here.

To apply this patch I cd'd into the nvidia installation directory created by running the installer with the -x flag. I downloaded the NVIDIA_kernel-177.82.diff.txt from the link posted above. The patch syntax was:
patch -p0 < /path/to/NVIDIA_kernel-177.82.diff.txt