Well, this is embarrassing. Uh, don’t quite know what happened. But my panel is gone a bit haywire, first of all I can’t see what programs I’m running anymore, the clock has sort of gone just right of centre of the panel and everything else has laid itself right next to the chameleon. And if I try to add a widget the whole plasma workspace crashes! I am currently using KDE 4.7(I think) in OpenSuse 12.1
So, you can of course try to fix the Panel, but I wonder if you might want to just restart your settings for KDE4? If you rename the hidden file using Dolphin (you must allow hidden files to be shown) called /home/username/.kde4 to .kde4x and then log out and back in, all of your KDE4 settings will revert back to their default settings. I know its a pain, but I know of no other simple solution.