Comment 2 for bug 53897

I remember having problem in Dapper with the XFCE desktop.

I found a thread about this at:
http://www.vectorlinux.com/forum2/index.php?topic=1603.msg9441

I extracted a possible explanation:

=== extracted information from forum ======
By default, XFce saves your settings when you exit it. If the taskbar was gone when you exited XFce, it won't appear the next time you start XFce. So doing Alt-F2 and typing xfce4-panel will make the XFce panel reappear and if it's there when you exit, it'll be there the next time you start. At least that's how it's supposed to work.

When I have XFce set up the way I like, I make a backup copy of my home directory's /.config directory. Then if something weird happens, I can exit XFce and from a command prompt without X running, I delete my current /.config directory and copy the backup directory to /.config. Do startx or startxfce4 and everything should look like it was.

If you're going to make a backup directory of /.config, do it often because you'll doubtless have changes in that directory that you don't want to lose. Backups are wonderful things!
====== end of citation ============

Can you update/upgrade your system and verify if you still have the problem with a recent version (Edgy) or update version of your install ?

Otherwise, can you try the mentioned workaround and report back any results here ?

Thanks for helping in making Xubuntu better!