Doug Saylor posted on Mon, 10 Aug 2009 21:03:17 -0500 as excerpted:
Thanks again for everyone's help. Question: why didn't un-installing Pan
then re-installing solve my problem? Thanks.
IIRC (after checking your OP), you're new to Linux from Windows, correct?
Linux works a bit differently than MS Windows in this regard. Linux
separates user data and general system configuration and applications
much more effectively than MS does (or used to, anyway, I've not used MS
since 9x). The idea is that one should not affect the other, both
because Linux, as with all *ix, was designed from the beginning as a
multi-user system, with each user having their own separate settings, and
so that each individual user and the system in general can be managed
separately.
So when you uninstalled pan, you uninstalled the executable and other
system data related to pan, but it didn't touch your user data, including
your pan user data. Since that's where the problem was, uninstalling and
reinstalling pan did nothing to solve it.