Okay this is an interesting one and it has been going for sometime. When I cold boot the laptop - not everything is initialized correctly. There is no login sound and as you can see in the screenshot - not all the panel applets are displayed or are not displayed correctly. Now when I reboot or logout and log back in it than works fine. I tried an experiment and switched the default from metacity to compiz and the next cold booted the machine and it did not do this. I than switched it back to metacity as the default and than later cold booted the machine and the problem reappeared. That is why I suspect maybe it has something to do with metacity. I will run it with compiz for awhile and see if the problem occurs with compiz but so far it has not. It certainly could be something else though. I will also attach my xseesion logs to see if that will help at all.
Here is my xseesion log. If there is any other info I can give you than let me know. Despite the fact that the wireless indicator suggest I am not connected to the Internet - I am. The update-manager also does not function when this happens. The applet loads but when I click the Check button; it does nothing.