ksystraycmd & panel hiding

This isn't a top priority issue, and I can probably live many years more without resolving it; but it is really annoying. When the panel does its self-hiding trick, I call down curses upon the heads of the developers and all their kind, too. There are actually two issues, maybe three; but I think maybe they are all related to the panel, thus I put them together here. 1. is trivial, but still annoying. Whenever I start up certain apps, I get a two icons in the panel; a smaller icon, but also a shadow icon - a larger reduplication of the original - but I only need the first. I have got in the habit of just killing the shadow icons by running the command pkill ksystraycmd, and then it goes away until I run another app. Somehow or other (back when I was running KDE3), I found a way to suppress the shadow icons, but now I can't find it in my notes, and nothing online. I went into TCC, and unclicked boxes in menu items, etc., but it keeps returning. 2. Panel hiding is much more annoying. Quite by accident, when some object on my desk hits the mouse, my panel suddenly hides, and will not come back. I've tried changing settings, locking the panel, etc.; it even survives reboots and shutdowns. I try clicking to restore the panel, and NOTHING HAPPENS, and continues not to happen, for ever. 3. When I unlock the panel, and move round the icons, it gets totally messed up. Even if I lock it, the icons keep moving round, and again, this behavior survives through reboots and shutdowns. When at last I get my icons to behave, and lock the panel and leave it alone. For 2 & 3, I have tried killing the panel by running pkill kicker, then restarting, but this doesn't work so well. When it does work at all, the panel appears on only one out of my 20 desktops, and again, this sometimes persists through multiple reboots. Any suggestions or help would be appreciated. Bill