Comment 163 for bug 439448

Actually yeah, you are right, Mint is based on Ubuntu. This conversation contains already too much info, I think. So just to conclude it:

1. it only happens at startup
2. if u reload the panel, everything gets OK
3. the corrupted icon greyed out and is not working, but if you still see a little bit of it, you can click on that part
4. as far as I know, only the notification area or the Indicator applet session button are affected

Possible solution: compare the differences between the way how is the panel loaded at startup ←→ and how is the panel loaded back after killing it

or

compare all that with the way how it works in other gnome distros

That is up to the developers, the users can't contribute any more.