The panel always expands right or down. So, if you have the panel snapped to the lower right corner and add an item or run an app that adds a systray icon, the panel is expanded off the screen. It should be like hiding and detect which screen edge is closest and expand away from the screen edge.
This should be fixed in 4.0.4. What version do you run?
To the best of my knowledge this is fixed in 4.0.4