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gnome-panel gets stuck if the X server is killed from under it. It seems like SIGPIPE has been set to SIG_IGN and so it doesn't die appropriately. The stack trace looks bogus, but it could be there is some atexit handler doing bad things or something.
So alex, kevin, and I looked at this today. It turns out there is an atexit handler setup by ORBit to do shutdown. This results in panel_applet_frame noticing its connection with the applet died and trying to pop up a dialog asking if we'd like to reload the applet. Popping up the dialog results in an X round trip (because somewhere in the stack we call gdk_x11_get_server_time) and this makes us spin.
This still happens (to me) on FC6-Test2, fully updated to rawhide as of 2006-8-13. gnome-panel has been crashing a lot lately, and each time it does I have to Ctrl-Alt-Bkspace to get back at login screen and re-login. But then the gnome panel wouldn't start claiming another instance is running. I have to drop to tty1 and kill the defunct gnome-panel there before I could proceed.