You seem to be answering your own question. Stop running GNOME panel and see if the problem goes away. If it does, complain to the authors of GNOME panel.
In X Windows programming, each app asks for a colormap. If one app asks for a large colormap, the window manager doles out whatever is left to everyone else. Netscape is also a big offender here. You reclaim colormaps by closing the offending apps. It is an issue of X programming that is rather mytical. Most people simply accept the colormap given them by X. Apparently the GNOME panel is not one of them. >> > I have the same problems even if the only thing I have running is gnome > panel. I wish this issue can be investigated thouroughly because the > colormap problem is not so rife on Windows and it seem sto be a huge thing > on Linux. The same applies to fonts by the way. Does this has anything to > do with Linux or is it the video card problem? > > Secondly how can I reclaim lost colormaps or how can I query programs to > find how many color maps they are using? By the way in my latest test I > removed .Xdefaults file to make sure that there are no colors used. > >
