Apparently the panel is set to check /proc/apm upon startup and if it finds certain things in it, display the battery applet. However, this check will crash on certain computers with certain apm implementations. (Seems to be mostly laptops). I am quite sure that it is the panel that causes the crash as renaming/removing the battery_applet executable does not fix the problem, only booting with "linux apm=off" seems to help. A hard-coded check of this sort of thing just seems wrong to me, especially when bugs like this crop up. Why not simply allow the user to start the applet on his own if he wishes? If there is a way to bypass this, please let us know, or possibly release a bugfix? Jp Robinson, Consumer Support.
This is a hardware bug. The panel isn't doing anything out of the ordinary. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 21185 ***