i've made the picture dinky as i can while having it big enough to see. as you can tell, everything to the right -- taskbar, icons of running applications -- has gotten squashed. before i moved the icons on the left, simply rearranging them, everything was distributed nicely across the bottom of the screen. i do not know if having a black background is hiding some handle i can use to stretch stuff out, but if it is i cannot find anything about it. and every time i moved an icon to be in a grouping of other similar applications, the stuff on the right got squashed further, though no new icons were being added to kicker. nor can i find a configuration file i can screw around with. anybody know how i can fix this? dep Some pictures:  http://www.ipernity.com/doc/depscribe/album

bingo! many thanks! (though i think it is a bug that moving icons around changes the sizes of everything else.)