Comment 3 for bug 530639

My notification area is growing too and it seems to be caused by pidgin. I've configured to show an icon only when I have a message, and after some appearing and disappearing of the icon, the notification area begins occupying more and more space, though it is empty, and pushes other applets and icons on the left.

Closing pidgin suddenly frees the notification area. There are also some remaining vertical lines left by some other icons (I can't reproduce this reliably).

This is not a duplicate of bug #529052, as this is about the notification area of gnome-panel, not about indicator-application.