Independent control center windows come up at the wrong size at startup and then resize as the content fills in. This looks quite bad. What should happen is that it should wait for the contents before mapping the window (though this is annoying in another way if the capplet is too slow.) It shouldn't be too hard to implement it - control-center-signal just has to check socket->plug_window until it becomes non-NULL. This could be done in a 10-times-per-second timeout, or possible a little harder while (!socket->plug_winndow) g_main_iteration. Hardest thing here is probalby taking care of the failure case where the child doesn't start at all.
We (Red Hat) should really try to fix this before next release.
While it's not pretty, I just added a default size of 400 x 400. This is better for the capplets that are too small to begin with, and is less code changed.