Comment 46 for bug 532436

Thank you for the head up Cesare, now i'm sure i'm also affected by that very same problem too: the thing is curious because everytime i was manually restarting the gdm, the panels never get messy and everything would load as normal.

It looks like as the boot scripts at startup are loaded in parallel and there is some sort of syncing problem: i don't know why gnome panels and applets get screwed up at a so late booting stage, but i feel some of the components get loaded too early without syncing with others from which they could depend upon.
I don't know if and what configuration services are at stake, but i have both panels and/or applets screwed up whenever the problem occurs, while applications (gedit/vi/chrome..) always load fine, as far as i can tell.