no buttons on menu bar

[jjge]

I am running Mint 17 Qiana MATE 64 bit. On one of the user accounts, no buttons appear on the menu bar when a new window is opened. And when the window is minimized, it just goes away, even without properly closing (eg when typing a mai, the unfinished mail will be gone).
It is only one user acoount, so I suspect it is in the user setup. Any suggestions?

[xenopeek]

Right-click an empty space on your panel, select to add to panel, select the window list one and things should be fine again.

[jjge]

Thanks a lot! That was the solution!

(Clearly a menu bar is now a panel...).

It would seem that my wife (who is the user) has accidentally turned it off by clicking on something...

The question remains if it is useful to make such a fairly heavy change so easily accessible without any warning. For instance, it transforms "minimize window" into "close window immediately without saving". Which is not very nice when you just minimize your mail screen to look up something for inclusion into the mail you are typing...

[xenopeek]

For instance, it transforms "minimize window" into "close window immediately without saving".

It does not; you could still have used Alt+Tab to cycle through your running applications and pop up any minimized windows that way (hold down the Alt key, and tap the Tab key repeatedly to cycle through all your running applications). Minimizing to the panel doesn't close applications. But indeed, if you have removed the window list applet from the panel, you don't see a list of windows that you have minimized--they are still there however.