I have a vertical panel in kde 4.3.4. It should maximise to occupy the full height of the screen, but if I activate dual screen setup after my kde session starts, where the new main monitor is the external monitor which is much bigger than my laptop display, the kde panel keeps its initial height, the height of my laptop display.

Clicking through a few dialogs to get to maximise panel is getting tedious. This is linux, so I imagine there's a way I can script this. I'm happy with Perl and am looking for an excuse to get in python.

thanks
Tim

Could it be here?
scripting plasma-desktop

Thanks for the link. The link to the API in that article is broken.
I previously came across
http://techbase.kde.org/KDE_System_Admi ... pScripting
but

I would love for an example of how to do this ... I see references to the javascripting API but no tutorials or examples.

Please see $KDEDIR/share/apps/plasma-desktop/init/00-defaultLayout.js

Note that such operations are possible only from 4.4 onwards (4.4.2 or later preferred due to some changes in the JS bindings). Even better support is in trunk (future release 4.5 of the SC).