I use lxde with fusion-icon (compiz). Ocassionally, lxpanel disappears. When I open a terminal to restart it, it says that it is already running. So, I use 'pkill lxpanel' and then restart it. This happens often enough, once or twice a day, that I wanted to create a desktop link to automatically restart it. Unfortunately, pkill doesn't seem to work the same way in a script. It kills lxpanel, but the script stops without restarting lxpanel. After a little bit of googling and testing, this seems to work everytime, even if lxpanel crashed:
#!/bin/bash
kill `pidof lxpanel`
lxpanel
I saved this as a script and created a desktop launcher and now in one click my panel is back.
Galen