Comment 26 for bug 36189

The best solution that works for me I've come up so far is the following:
The problem seems to be that gnome has difficulties to decide whether it should store the position of an applet as aligned to the left or to the right. Consequently, what I did was in the gconf-editor manually browse to
/apps/panel/applets
and under applets and objects, manually set the panel_right_stick and position keys to the correct values, incrementing the position value by just one pixel between the different applets/objects in order to be sure that they really stick as much left resp right as they should. I.e.:
main menu: position=0
firefox launcher: position=1
[...]
user switcher applet: stick right, position=0
date applet: stick right, position=1
volume applet: stick right, position=2

and so on - so far worked well after changing resolution several times, applets always nicely ordered!