Title. There's... Really no other way I can describe this. I switched layouts once or twice via zorin appearance to see which style looked better with my theme, and the taskbar suddenly vanished. It persisted between restarts, and when I tried to edit the panel I found this error.
Kill the panel service: xfce4-panel --quit and pkill xfconfd
Remove config files: rm ~/.config/xfce4/panel and rm ~/.config/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml/xfce4-panel.xml
Start the panel with alt+F2
That actually fixed it, thanks! there were a ton of errors and weird lag but taskbar's back. I have a new respect for people running lowend rigs like this now