GNOME applications menu empty

The GNOME applications menu shows no installed applications in any user account. Also, when I try to access help within GNOME, I get an error message about no file association. I tried editing applications.menu based on information from the GNOME lists, but to no avail. I have all the current GNOME ports installed under 10.4.9 PPC. KDE is also installed, and seems to work about as well as you would expect. Anyone else have this problem? Thanks for replies.