I’ve been using a laptop with linux mint16 for about a year and a half. While it has worked great, I wanted to update to the latest fully supported version of linux mint. I followed these instructions and every thing seemed to go well. I was happy as a clam for several days, but suddenly, my system had no menus. I can’t think of a reason that the menu went away; I don’t remember anything unusual happening nor do I remember adding software after the upgrade to 17.1.

I was able to right-click on the screen and get to a terminal window. I was able to open all of the files that I could think of the name of and all seemed to work normally. However, nothing seemed to bring the menu back. I did attempt the following command:
sudo mintmenu --reset
but didn’t have any success. I was able to use
sudo synaptic
to open the package manager, and I uinstalled and reinstalled the mintmenu package, but I didn’t notice any difference. My wife suggested that the problem was the panel after she looked at another computer on which we have mint installed.
When I right-clicked on where the panel normally is (in my case, the bottom of the screen) produced no panel references in the corresponding menu. I still had the package manager open, though, and I uninstalled and reinstalled the panel manager for MATE, named ‘mate-panel’ and ‘mate-panel-common’, rebooted the computer and voilà, I had the panel back. Next I right clicked on the panel and added ‘Main Menu’ back. I now had a menu, but it wasn’t the one with the favorites that I really liked. A little experimentation revealed that I needed to add the one titled ‘mintMenu’. After adding this I was back close to the way that I wanted my system. I now had the default menu do the the reset that I had attempted as one of the first steps to solving this, but the menu is easy to customize.

One additional note-right clicking on the panel area at the bottom of the screen will allow you to move the items after selecting ‘move’.  You can’t seem to simply click and drag to move them around.

If you have this problem I hope this helps you figure it out.