Lost desktop

I am running a distro of Linux that uses Ubuntu as its core. I have asked my issue in the distros forums and cannot seem to get any help. I get notifications in the upper irght corner of my screen. One came up and I thought it was an updates notification. I clicked on it and my desktop was replaced by some general wallpaper. All of the shortcut icons and all of the panel are gone. The notification reads: Power manager...Your battery is charging. Trouble is that this PC, a laptop has a dead battery and I run it on AC power only. So the batter will NOT charge. It seems like the system is preserving resources while it is trying to charge.

I have a Timeshift snapshot on a USB drive, but TS seems to have forgotten that I put those there and I cannot seem to get it to find them so I could do a restore.

Better would be to get whatever is doing this in Power manager to stop and then hopefully return my system to me.

Thanks for any help