This isn't a top priority issue, and I can probably live many years more 
without resolving it; but it is really annoying. When the panel does its 
self-hiding trick, I call down curses upon the heads of the developers and 
all their kind, too. 

There are actually two issues, maybe three; but I think maybe they are all 
related to the panel, thus I put them together here. 

1. is trivial, but still annoying. Whenever I start up certain apps, I get a 
two icons in the panel; a smaller icon, but also a shadow icon - a larger 
reduplication  of the original - but I only need the first. I have got in the 
habit of just killing the shadow icons by running the command pkill 
ksystraycmd, and then it goes away until I run another app. 

Somehow or other (back when I was running KDE3), I found a way to suppress the 
shadow icons, but now I can't find it in my notes, and nothing online. I went 
into TCC, and unclicked boxes in menu items, etc., but it keeps returning. 

2. Panel hiding is much more annoying. Quite by accident, when some object on 
my desk hits the mouse, my panel suddenly hides, and will not come back. I've 
tried changing settings, locking the panel, etc.; it even survives reboots 
and shutdowns. I try clicking to restore the panel, and NOTHING HAPPENS, and 
continues not to happen, for ever. 

3. When I unlock the panel, and move round the icons, it gets totally messed 
up. Even if I lock it, the icons keep moving round, and again, this behavior 
survives through reboots and shutdowns. When at last I get my icons to 
behave, and lock the panel and leave it alone. 

For 2 & 3, I have tried killing the panel by running pkill kicker, then 
restarting, but this doesn't work so well. When it does work at all, the 
panel appears on only one out of my 20 desktops, and again, this sometimes 
persists through multiple reboots. 

Any suggestions or help would be appreciated. 

Bill