Misery loves company!
A week, or so ago, one of my laptops started having issues with the menu and the panel, after the machine automatically suspends a few times. Some programs will launch from the menu and some will not. It always seems to be the same programs (which will launch ... or not). Ditto for the three, or four launchers that I have on the panel. BTW - I'm running Solus/Budgie.
I find that only a reboot, or issuing: $ nohup budgie-panel --replace& (I usually need to issue this 2x) will reestablish menu and launcher functionality. During the course of diag, I disabled suspend and lo and behold, the problem still happens after a period of inactivity.
I'm glad to hear that I'm not the only one experiencing this problem, because after performing updates on a second laptop today (also Solus/Budgie), it has started doing the same thing!!!
I'm wondering if there is an easy solution, or if it is something that the devs need to address on their end.
FYI - If it is of any help to the devs who may glance at this, one machine is a ThinkPad T420 and the other is a ThinkPad T440p.
EDIT:
I might also mention that it's not just the menu and the panel launchers which are affected, but also the panel applets, such as the Lock/Suspend/Hibernate/Restart/Shutdown applet. Unless I reset Budgie, using the command above, I have to issue a terminal command to shut the machine down.