LXPanel LXMenu - Hide and Seek menu directories and launcher items disappearing, doubled menu

[littlemissmosfet]

OS: Debian GNU/Linux 12 (bookworm) aarch64
Host: Raspberry Pi 4 Model B Rev 1.4
Kernel: 6.12.20+rpt-rpi-v8
Uptime: 1 hour, 2 mins
Packages: 4059 (dpkg)
Shell: bash 5.2.15
Resolution: 1280x800
DE: LXDE
WM: Openbox
WM Theme: Onyx
Terminal: guake
CPU: (4) @ 1.800GHz
Memory: 1363MiB / 7821MiB

Here's where I've been outlining this strange little error in more detail...
https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopi ... 5#p2310945

During a session trying to organize the menu with menulibre, apparently the ... whatever it is ... which combines /usr/share/applications and ~/.local/share/applications into a menu display has become confused. Almost all menu items disappeared from menu display.

I tried deleting folders, reinstalling lxmenu and lxpanel and related gewgaws. I finally tried alacarte. Alacarte shows double menus, with some empty and some not, but most directories are doubled. By hiding and deleting in alacarte I managed to coax lxmenu to show most of the directories and launchers again. But it is still missing the preferences folder, which shows double in alacarte along with a few others which do display in the menu.

Most of the searches have turned up info on the list of menu launchers in /usr/share/applications. These are fine, but don't show HOW lxmenu populates its list. Whatever list says which directory holds what is bad.

Lxmenu has some conf file somewhere which lists two of most menu directories. Where is this? How can I force LXMenu to recombine these directories and sort out whatever it doesn't like in its config or memory?

Thanks.

[littlemissmosfet]

Alacarte seems to have kludged this issue well enough. I managed to finagle it so that the lxmenu shows both sets of directories. Then I managed to delete those directories which were empty. All's well that ends well. But I shall not mark this solved as I don't understand WHY this problem occured nor where in the lxmenu nuts and bolts. So for future searchers, I can only say at this point: don't delete items, rather hide them. And if this trouble pops up, try fiddling with the directories and launcher entries in alacarte.