After spending hours on here and the net I finally decided to totally uninstall Xfce and found a decent way to then reinstall it again .... and surprise surprise .... all my saves .... installed programs and settings came back and the Panel is back to normal ....
Here is a person on this board with the exact same problem I had but it was never solved as he gave up .... me .... I just deleted Xfce and reinstalled it ....