panel seems to have gone into an infinite loop. owen said: "Click on the notification area, should fix I have a patch for that in gnome bugzilla ... need to put it into the distro" Workaround worked, please put patch in distro as it made desktop functionally unusable.
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=122327
* Tue Sep 16 2003 Owen Taylor <otaylor> 2.2.4-3.0 - Fix an infinite loop that can occur in the panel (#104524)