Essentially I am experiencing an issue where the panel becomes unresponsive.  Top shows it using a nominal but steady amount of CPU (around 60%).  Kill -9 causes it to restart normally.

  I have narrowed it down to the following conditions:
    It only happens when the task list is in the panel
    It only happens when a large number of application windows are open on the current desktop (the magic number appears to be 8)
    The above number only counts unique applications if grouping is turned on
    If I restart the panel when the above is true the panel freezes immediately

  If I launch the panel from a terminal I don't get any debug output.

  I assume if this is happening to others it has been noticed but I haven't been able to find any bug reports of this happening.  This started happening when xfce was upgraded during upgrade to Ubuntu Karmic.


James