Comment 225 for bug 439448

I see this sort of effect regularly on boot. The reliable work around for me is to log out and log in again. All the startup applications are in cache and the race conditions are not triggered. It seems it happens when the panel is a little slower than normal loading, and startup applications and applets are making use of its resources before it is fully initialized - the slower your disks and the more startup applications you have the more likely you are to see the problem.