YES YES that's it ! actually called 'task list' but that brought them 
back ! of course, as you noticed, now that i am another user i won't go 
back to that user. but what  a help , i must have spent 16 hours trying 
to find that, too many choices and i'm afraid i was getting worse and 
worse into trouble.
thx, next time i'll ask here first :-[
betty i

>
>It's hard to say what really happened, you could have removed it from
>your panel accidentally, or perhaps, it was a bug.
>
>In any case, the window list is an applet just like everything else on
>the panel.  So if you right click on your panel a small menu will come
>up with a menu item "Add to Panel".  Under that menu there is all the
>applets that are installed on your system.  The one that that you are
>refering to is under Utilities->Window List.
>
>Hope that help
>