Comment 12 for bug 944468

Okay, a part of the mystery is unveiled.
I installed xfce4.10 (from source) and the behavior of the keyboard panel plugin changed to consistently
forgetting all but the first two layouts (us, cz-qwerty) on every system startup. It also forgot the layout switching key.
Then it dawned on me that xfce has a keyboard preference app in the system settings
and it turned out to be set to use two keyboard layouts: us and cz-qwerty.
Sooo, it seems that the xfce settings daemon resets the xkb settings to the preferences set in the system settings
dialog at each startup and is totally unaware of the settings changed in the xkb-panel-plugin.
This would seemingly lead to a simple solution to the problem of xfce forgetting keyboard preferences
as I could simply set them in the system keyboard settings and all would be dandy,
except that the keyboard preferences in the system settigs don't let you set the layout switcher key.
The option is simply not there and the settings daemon always sets the layout switching key to none.

Would there be a way of making the xkb-panel-plugin aware of and able to change the system keyboard preferences?
That might just solve tho whole thing as at this point, is seems the problem is caused by an xfce settings daemon
and the keyboard panel plugin competing for the attention of the xkb module.

Fix it and you will put the smile on the faces of gazillions of international xfce users. :D