After installing the Xfce4 desktop environment on a clean Fedora Core 2 installation the /usr/lib/xfce4 directory has the permissions 0700 and thus none of the settings show up in the settings manager, And many of the panel components do not function.
it's fixed in xfce4-panel-4-0-5-3, which will showed up in rawhide soon. Thanks for your report.