Disclaimer: I am 100% not a Gnome expert.
Quoting Jacek Generowcz
XMonad then runs beautifully, except for one serious problem: no application menus appear at all, neither in the application windows, nor on the panel (appmenu).
This sounds vaguely like a communication problem. Other gnome applications seem to prefer dbus for IPC; have you definitely got a session dbus started correctly and all the appropriate environment variables exported? In case it helps, I have the following in my .xinitrc: #!/usr/bin/env zsh setopt allexport eval $(dbus-launch --sh-syntax --exit-with-session) eval $(gnome-keyring-daemon --components=pkcs11,secrets,ssh,gpg) unsetopt allexport If you don't use zsh, run dbus-launch manually once to see which variables to export. Cheers, ~d