Just another tip I found on the web.

Remoting into desktop for UBUNTU. I did something and the menus no longer showed up when I would try remote connection.

This helped me to have my top bar of applications show up again.

cd /home/”youruser”
echo “gnome-session –session=ubuntu-2d” > .xsession
sudo /etc/init.d/xrdp restart

The tip was here: https://askubuntu.com/questions/91657/blank-desktop-when-logging-in-via-xrdp