Using openSuSE 11.1 on my home machine with the latest build of KDE4 in its Community Repository (not there to check right now, but it's 4.3.x.y).

My setup is slightly abnormal. I have a vertical panel set up along the left side of the screen, going from the bottom edge to about the halfway between the bottom and top of the screen.

Starting about halfway into the life of 4.2, it's been doing something odd. Every time I start up, compositing is disabled. It starts up in this fashion without any "compositing suspended" bubbles popping out of the system tray. I have to hit Alt+Shift+F12 every time I log into a KDE session, and sometimes when I do this, it blinks a few times and then returns to the same, non-compositing state. I have Desktop Effects turned on in the System Settings.

The is an additional issue which started very late in 4.2 and persists into 4.3. The panel is set usually to a width of around 64, so I have two columns of icons in the systray. Every time I start KDE, this width decreases slightly. I can set the width to 100, and the next login it will be 80, and the next time 60, and so on, until the panel is too narrow to properly display its content. I find that every time I log on, I have to unlock widgets, hit the little panel settings button drag the width slider back to where I want it, and relock the widgets.

I tried chmodding the "~/.kde4/share/config/plasma-desktop-appletsrc" file -- the only file I could find in ~/.kde4/share/config that seemed to record the panel width -- to 400, but this did not solve the problem. Other panel elements were frozen (for example, applets could no longer be deleted), but the panel still resized itself upon every login.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I suspect I'm going to have to do a complete reinstall of my system, but I don't think that's ever a sensible means of fixing problems.

This is possibly a bug in Plasma's layouting code, which should be reported at bugs.kde.org, with a copy of your ~/.kde4/config/plasm* files attached.