Desktop doesn't seem to be running

Hello, I’m pretty new to linux in general, but would like to learn to use it more.

But I’ve run into a problem I can’t seem to find an answer for. The desktop doesn’t seem to be running. I mean all I see is the opensuse logo (I have a wallpaper set otherwise) and right click doesn’t work, no shortcuts are shown and it’s completely unusable. I’m running opensuse 12.1 xfce desktop environment.

Any help would be appreciated

apparently the only thing I had to do was run xfdesktop. I would’ve thought that sort of thing would run at startup and I hope I won’t have to do it every time I log in.

The desktop failed to initialize and/or the window manager crashed. You have to find out why or it might happen again. It can have different causes from general misconfiguration, missing wrong package (wrong version), offending desktop applet or various bugs in software or video drivers.