User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.1) Gecko/20070208 Mandriva/2.0.0.1-8mdv2007.1 (2007.1) Firefox/2.0.0.1 Build Identifier: when maximizing windows, it would be a nice thing to have them fill the entire screen including any panels without having to activate "always on top". IMO, it should be the other way round: the panel should be configurable to be "not on top" for maximized windows. Reproducible: Always
You can use fullscreen (F11, I believe) to get what you want. Otherwise... that's just how it is. The option to change the panel's layer was removed for 4.2 to fix some annoying bugs. Not likely to come back.
Hmm, that's a pity. This for example prevents having a lower layered panel when using alternate "modern" window managers besides xfvwm like beryl, compiz or metisse. But however, F11 is at least some kind of workaround, at least when xfvwm is running.