This was reported running Gnome on Fedora but could be extended to other distributions.

When connecting to a Gnome desktop, the clock and other applets may or may not appear in the top Gnome Panel. Application Launchers that were added by the user may not appear. Also, the Gnome Panel at the bottom may not contain the Window List applet.

This appears to be a problem with access policies of the DBUS service. A new rule can be added to rectify this problem by executing the following instructions as root:

1. Create a new user group (the group name is an example, you may use what you wish, but need to be consistent)

# groupadd dbusext

2. Add the users accessing Gnome via NX to the group

# usermod -a -G dbusext <username>

3. Configure the new group in the DBUS policy rules: Edit the file

/etc/dbus-1/system.d/nm-applet.conf

with your favorite editor and add the following text just after the block "<policy user="root"> ... </policy>"

<policy group="dbusext">
<allow own="org.freedesktop.NetworkManagerInfo"/>
<allow send_destination="org.freedesktop.NetworkManagerInfo"/>
<allow send_interface="org.freedesktop.NetworkManagerInfo"/>
</policy>

Save the file

4. Restart the DBUS service

#service messagebus restart

If after these changes, the problem still exists, it could be that the Gnome configuration is broken.

You can test this by doing the following:

Backup the following folders, and remove them.

$HOME/.gconf
$HOME/.gconfd
$HOME/.gnome
$HOME/.gnome2
$HOME/.gnome2_private
/tmp/gconfd-<username>
/tmp/orbit-<username>