Hi, I incurred in the same problem! I followed the hint in the first reply about the "order" in which the different components are called, but that turned out to not solve the issue unless I disable xfdesktop. (you can play with the order by having a look at the xfce4-settings-editor in the xfce4-session group, and change them using xfconf-query) Anyway no matter what the order seems that starting xfdesktop along with xmonad always hides the xfce4-panel. My solution is to start xmonad using a small script: #!/bin/bash sleep 2 xmonad --replace That's it , a little delay for xmonad allows xfdesktop to do it's thing safely with xfce4-panel and xfwm4 and everyone is happy :) I assume that this happens because xmonad is faster than xfdesktop and does something unexpected (perhaps ovverriding some environment variable as the first reply suggested?), or maybe simply doesn't give xfdesktop sufficient time to talk to xfwm4? hope this helps Antonio Damian Philipp <damian.philipp@...> writes: