Comment 2 for bug 392066

This happened to me as well. With the thin line instead of the hamster text field, the context menu of hamster is not accessible at all.
Therefore I have stopped the hamster applet process in a terminal with command 'kill -9 <Process ID>'. After this an error window has opened and I confirmed there that the hamster applet process should not be started again.

When I newly added the hamster applet subsequently it showed up the right way.