Vacant Main Window - No Programs Menu Seen

Ignorant Zorin noob here, I'm afraid. I wish to use Zorin as a live bootable OS rather than installing it. In the past, this has worked great (once I lower the resolution so this old man's eyes can read the text). There was an easy-to-find start-type menu for launching system and other applications.

But for some reason I don't understand, that's no longer the case. I made a small contribution and downloaded Zorin-OS-12.4-Core-64, and used Yumi to add it to a multi-boot flash drive. When it booted up, the main desktop window appeared, but I could not find the main menu anywhere at all. If I right-clicked on the desktop, nothing was relevant to the main menu at all. The closes thing was the option to launch a terminal, but I have absolutely no idea if I could start the main menu with it, or what commands might do this, at all.

So I tried going back to Zorin-OS-12.2-Core-64, which is what worked fine in the past. But again for some unknown reason, when I tried it, I also could find no main menu!

Kindly advise this dummy what's going wrong and how I can fix it, because when it was working for me in the past, I totally loved Zorin! Might Yumi be somehow involved in this?

Thanks for your patience with me!

Hi, I gave up on Yumi years ago, especially after I would spend 30 minutes thinking it was creating an .iso image and then got the report "not compatible/not supported"!
Do you see the 'Z' at all on the panel? To launch it in Core you have to use the key combination of Alt+ F1. If you are referring to 'MainMenu' menu editor you may have to install it.

Code:

sudo apt-get install alacarte

Thanks for your speedy reply, Swarfendor437!

Please forgive my extreme newbieness. The first "Z" I see is on the initial boot screen, but I havenn't tried to select any of the options there; I just press Enter to boot. The second "Z" appears in the center of the second screen, all alone with no other function items. But once the boot is complete, there is NOTHING on the screen other than the desktop background.

Do I press Alt+F1 on that third screen, or on one of the previous two screens?

Thanks again!

OK, Let's go back to square 1 please!:

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