Comment 7 for bug 1271713

To test just the patch:

# required tools to get and build xfdesktop
sudo apt-get install git build-essential xfce4-dev-tools
sudo apt-get build-dep xfdesktop4
# get all the xfdesktop source from upstream
git clone git://git.xfce.org/xfce/xfdesktop
cd xfdesktop
# checkout the commit in question
git checkout 05adaa59dbedd89b3e0ae6001ff367572c1be7d2
# pull the patch out
git format-patch -1
# switch to the release commit
git checkout xfdesktop-4.11.3
# create a temp branch to test with
git checkout -b 4.11.3
# apply our fix
git am 0001-Fix-an-settings-issue-when-plug-names-aren-t-availab.patch
# build xfdesktop
./autogen.sh
make
sudo make install

Then you can kill xfdesktop and start it up again (it should load from
/usr/local/bin first). Once you're done testing you can do a
sudo make uninstall to get back to the version installed by Xubuntu.
You can also run git checkout master and then autogen/make/make install
to test all the latest xfdesktop changes upstream, if you like.