It can be hard to get right-click menu of the notification area since tray icons occupy most of the area and they have their own right-click menus. Thus it would handy, if the notification area would have a handle similar to task list's optional handle. (I would make it mandatory, though.)
You can either show the frame (which can be considered ugly) or simply use Ctrl+Right-click to open the panel item's properties dialog. Alternatively you can use the panel's settings dialog to get to the properties of systray.