GNOME panel in both Red Hat GNOME (RH 6.2 version) as well as Helix GNOME has a bug/feature that is either not intended, or is a nice video game thrown in by the GNOME developers. ;o) Click on the GNOME foot menu, and then right click on any section heading such as "Programs", "KDE menus", or any other sufficiently large tree. Choose the option "add this as a drawer to panel", and then sit back and watch the sparks fly. The hard disk kicks in chugging away for about 10 seconds or so while numerous program icons flash all over the screen randomly and disappear. When it is all done, you end up with a big mucked up game of GNOME panel drawer boulderdash to play. ;o) It doesn't crash, or at least didn't for me, and all the crap seems to actually work if you click on something, but it is obvious that this was not the programmers intentions at all. Either large menu trees should be flagged somehow to not be allowed as drawers or else the "drawer" concept needs to be rethought out. At least 4 other people have tested this and reported to me that they could duplicate the problem on zoot-list. Good luck. ;o)
This is the correct behavior, though potentially a little surprising at first. The only problem is that it starts out fully expanded -- perhaps it should be fully closed initially.