Main Menu and Catalog Tree View in ArcCatalog are not visible

Right-click anywhere in the gray area where menus or buttons would be at the top, or even on a button if you have any toolbars showing. Choose the Customize option, and in the resulting box you should be able to turn the Main Menu back on, from which as jbchurchill notes you can turn the Catalog Tree back on from the Windows dropdown menu.

If for some reason you don't have anywhere you can right-click to bring up that shortcut, the keyboard shortcut for it is alt-c though that may only work if you have the main menu visible (I can't turn mine off to test).

You might also want to check if things have been moved off-screen somehow. This is easiest to do by right-clicking somewhere on your desktop to get the display properties and changing the resolution, which will normally force any off-screen windows to redraw somewhere visible.

As a second-to-last resort, you can try deleting your Arc settings templates in your Windows user profile at:

• C:\Users\yourusername\AppData\Roaming\ESRI\Desktop10.2\ArcCatalog\normal.gxt
• C:\Users\yourusername\AppData\Roaming\ESRI\Desktop10.2\ArcMap\Templates\normal.mxt

And as a very last resort... Reinstall Arc.

I had the same problem and I solved by deleting the normal templates for ArcCatalog or ArcMap (depending on which one you are having problem, the files are located in:

• For ArcCatalog - C:\Users\yourusername\AppData\Roaming\ESRI\Desktop10.2\ArcCatalog\normal.gxt
• For ArcMap - C:\Users\yourusername\AppData\Roaming\ESRI\Desktop10.2\ArcMap\Templates\normal.mxt

I also had the same problem and deleting normal.gxt worked. Thanks