Comment 48 for bug 53897

Hi, not sure if this helps but, by default, some .desktop files have the value NoDisplay set to "true" and therefore will not appear in the XFCE menu. This happens with wine (for instance), causing the "Other" sub-menu to disappear randomly. This may be the cause of some of the menu problems stated here (I have no idea how to solve the crashing panel stuff).

To correct this, you can set the value manually for each .desktop file you want to appear in the menu, or use a script to set all NoDisplay values to "false" automatically (which will probably result in unwanted and/or duplicated menu items, which you will have to edit or remove by hand).

I chose the latter (which incidentally did result in unwanted and duplicated items, but I simply removed the .desktop files associated to them, they were less than the hidden items and less of a hassle to deal with).
Here is the script, which must be run as root. It works for Fedora, not sure if Ubuntu stores XFCE menu files in the same directory though.

#!/bin/bash
cd /usr/share/applications
ls|grep desktop |
while read file
do
   sed s/"NoDisplay=true"/NoDisplay=false/ $file > temp_$file
        mv temp_$file $file
done