Just received the following from someone off-list - so looks like we have a bug report and a proposed fix! Yay! ---------------------------------- Hi rupa, I saw your recent message on the xmonad mailing list archives about problems with the GNOME workspace switcher in Ubuntu. I had just encountered the same issue and was looking for a solution. I've now posted a fix on the bug report at: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/400301/ Hopefully it'll be incorporated in an update soon, but in the meantime anyone who's bothered by this can apply the fix and rebuild the gnome-panel package from source yourself if they want. I'm not on the xmonad list and not particularly interested in joining at the moment, so perhaps you could pass a followup note on to the list about this, for the benefit of anyone else coming across this issue.