Comment 1 for bug 692052

Yes, it was a bad idea to make vertical buttons stretch in the other direction than horizontal (if the ratio for a button is 16:9 horizontal, it goes 9:16 vertical). Since the same images are used in both cases it will be horribly stretched either as horizontal or vertical buttons. I've been planning on changing this for a while but I've been delaying that change since I should check over a lot of other theming options as well and it's better to break backward compatibility just once than to spread it out (not that many themes should suffer from this change but anyways).

A temporal fix is to copy the theme you use from /usr/share/dockbarx/themes to ~/.dockbarx and open it and invert the button_pixmap aspect_ratio in the config file.