Actually, it seems to me that the post-2.17.3 clipping/drawing fixes made the status icons behave much better. I've put those fixes in rawhide now.

I don't think so. I tried to find which patch fixed it, and it just randomly sometimes works, independent of any of the currently applied patches in git master.

yeah, I found that too :-(

I can't seem to reproduce this after commit fa214590662ae57ec0011e25ec0c6fafb65b165d, anyone else?

That commit alone certainly doesn't fix it. I've backported it to my local 2.17.6 tree and on the next login most of the icons were missing.

It could well be some other patch that fixed it, that particular commit doesn't *look* like it should fix this issue.

Hmm, i saw this once again, so its not really fixed.

Same here, this morning I got a white rectangle instead of the icons. It reacted to input events unlike the case when you only got half of the icons on the correct background. I think these might be two separate bugs. The one where half of the icons were missing seems to be fixed at least here.

Created attachment 141139 [details]
Screenshot showing white rectangle where notification area should be

Attached a screenshot from moments ago (GTK+ 2.17.8).

I'm about to upgrade to GTK+ 2.17.9 and will confirm in the following days if I can reproduce it.

Still there with 2.17.9, exactly as shown in the screenshot.

Have people seen this recently? I haven't in a long time.

The white rectangle bug? Yesterday. The transparent icons bug? Not since 2.17.7.

Patryk: 
So, how often do you see this? Any pattern? Its kinda hard to debug this when i can't even get it to happen, we need to try to figure out under what circumstances it happens.

I had a report in the redhat bugzilla about this happening to someone after leaving the machine overnight (i.e. not on login), has anyone else seen this?

Alexander:

I can reproduce by logging off and on again until it eventually happens.

Patryk:
I just tried logging in and out for 15 minutes, and I never got this. So, maybe there is something different between our setups that make it easier for you. How long do you have to try to reproduce?

When I log in I get four notification icons (a11y, volume, NetworkManager and a pulseaudio control thing). Generally all but the volume one are visible when the panel first shows up and the volume one gets added shortly after that. A few times the a11y one is a bit delayed too.

Also, when you get this, how exactly does it behave? For instance:
How exactly does it look? (screenshot please?)
Does all functionallity work anyway? (click events, etc)
Is there any way to get rid of the white? (move systray, cover panel with fullscreen window, etc, etc)
What happens if you add a new notification icon (zenity --notification) when this happens?

For screenshot, see the attachment from comment #9.

Everything works - hovering over icons gives me tooltips, clicking activates their actions.

As for the cause - could you ask the other user about his/her video driver? I'm using nouveau git and this could be connected (I do not use gallium though).

Hmmm, I just got this on another machine, a laptop with an ATI Radeon Mobility X1600 card.
The other (desktop) machine is also ATI (R600 class), but here are the other differences between the two:
desktop runs F11 + gnome git (i.e. xorg 1.6.4, etc), laptop runs rawhide (xorg 1.7.0 rc 1)
desktop is x86-64, laptop is x86
desktop X driver has no DRI, laptop has DRI

The recent fedora report is:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=526672
Which seems to be x86-64 + recent X (due to being rawhide)

$ uname -a; rpm -q xorg-xserver-server xorg-driver-video-nouveau 
Linux meaw 2.6.31_vanilla-1 #1 SMP Sun Sep 13 22:37:10 CEST 2009 x86_64 Intel(R)_Core(TM)2_Duo_CPU_____T7500__@_2.20GHz PLD Linux
xorg-xserver-server-1.7.0-1.x86_64
xorg-driver-video-nouveau-0.0.10-0.20091002.1.x86_64

Changing the panel size makes the items paint again

Got this under the debugger. The core problem is that update_and_descendants_freeze_count is set to 1 on the toplevel BonoboPlug of the notification applet, causing it to ignore every expose operation until it gets a configure notify, which apparently its not getting.

Turns out this was a gtk+ bug, not really related to client side windows. Not
sure why csw triggered it.

Commit c5d086117982b1997389afd08a52ddaf2fdf8254 has the fix.

Alexander:

Thank's a lot for the time you spent on this! I've tried to trace it down for a while but had no luck pinning it to gtk (although I sniffed around changes related to csw).

I'm still seeing this with GTK+ 2.18.2. My (Xfce) power manager icon is gone.

Oh, and I should mention it works with GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1.

Christian: Does that happen every time? If so, that seems to be a different bug than this one, and I'd prefer to keep different bugs separate.

I can't say why, but it seems to work at this point. I suppose there's a chance something else interfered that unfortunately I can't determine anymore. Apologies for the trouble.