Comment 14 for bug 990774

The unwanted plus icon IS (was) present on my computer running Ubuntu 12.04 with AWN 0.4.1. The unwanted plus icon is NOT present on my backup computer running Debian testing with AWN 0.4.1 installed from the unstable repository.

I think I've gotten rid of the unwanted icon on my Ubuntu computer. (Yay.) What did I do? ...

apt-get build-dep avant-window-navigator
apt-get -b source avant-window-navigator
sudo dpkg -i avant*.deb

That makes no sense. How does simply recompiling fix the problem? ... Well...

On Debian, AWN stores its settings in '.gconf', but on Ubuntu, AWN stores its settings in *.ini files at ~/.config/desktop-agnostic/

The difference in how AWN stores its settings is probably set by flags (or whatever) during compilation because the source and patch files downloaded by apt-get on both machines are essentially identical. There's probably a defect in the code that loads the *.ini files. Simply recompiling does not set whatever special compile-time flags and creates a set of AWN packages that stores settings in '.gconf'. Having '.gconf' around just for AWN isn't 'elegant', but it's way better than that ugly plus icon.

I hope the above info is useful. Good luck, everyone.