From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 Galeon/1.2.6 (X11; Linux i686; U;) Gecko/20021006 Description of problem: When a corner panel has its hide arrows hidden, it shrinks around all its applets and launchers. if they are all the same size it fully shrinks leaving no pure panel visible. This means you cannot add anything or otherwise edit that panel's preferences. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. create a corner panel with a launcher 2. change panel preferences to hide the arrows 3. you can nolonger get to the panel's menus Additional info: The panel menu used to appear in all the menus spawned off of the panel (right clicking on an applet or launcher). This behavior seems to be gone. Bringing it back might be a good way to solve this.
We should also file this on http://bugzilla.gnome.org (there may already be a fix planned there), and put a link to that bug in a comment here.
Upstream as http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=103299