Comment 15 for bug 439448

I am not sure of this, but I believe this might be an Nvidia driver issue. I first saw this happen when using ARCH when they had updated to the 185 series drivers and saw it continue in the 190 series drivers. One can work around the problem if after start up( or login to gnome) one switches to VT1 ( by ctrl-alt-F1 ) and then switches back to VT7 (by ctrl-alt-F7 ). I think that this works because one is forcing a re-draw of the panel. My wild guess is that on start up, the icons are drawn on the notification area one at a time. When another icon is added to the notification area, it might not fit, so the notification areal is re-sized and the already drawn icons are moved over by a bit block transfer to either the left(or right). Sometimes the area that a moved icon previously occupied is not then erased with the background. Again, this is just pure speculation.

Interestingly, if one adds the hide button to the panel. one will get a half icon drawn on start up, rather than a fully drawn duplicate icon. Forcing a re-draw of the panel by hiding and then showing the panel using the hide button will not fix the problem. (Because the image for the panel cached somewhere?)