Comment 13 for bug 111893

I can also confirm this on 9.04 (i686) with gnome-panel 2.26.0. Roydhouse's method (comment #12) is effective in reproducing it. This bug seems to happen primarily when you change screen resolution. It severely affects laptop users, rendering the use of external monitors to be unnecessarily painful. Because laptop use is a major growth area of computing, it would be unwise to allow Gnome to continue to lag behind in usability in this area.

In general, gnome-panel needs to do a better job of identifying when the user wants to right-stick applets and objects. When variable-sized objects are right-aligned, as they expand, they move to the left, and when they shrink, they do not always move back to the right. This has to be corrected manually in the gconf registry, using the following method.

I use gconf-editor to manually set gnome-panel applets and objects to be: locked = true, panel_right_stick = true, and position = (position from right). For example, the rightmost applet has position = 0, the second-rightmost applet has position = 1, the third-rightmost applet has position = 2, etc. After setting these settings in gconf-editor, I do not unlock the applets/objects or move them via the GUI.

These settings seem to persist as long as I do not change screen resolution.

After a resolution change, I look up the panel applet/object settings in gconf-editor again. I notice that the panel_right_stick attribute is no longer set and the position attribute is now an absolute coordinate from the left-side of the panel.

Gnome-panel should not alter panel applet/object alignment/position settings, except when the user moves the widgets via the GUI. Resizing the panel should cause the right-aligned widgets to move, but should not be considered to be a (user-intended) moving of the widgets.