xfce4-panel dying?

[Josh Kelley]

We're having problems on several machines with xfce4-panel dying.  (At
least, I'm assuming this is what's happening.)  When this happens, the
session manager saves the fact that xfce4-panel is no longer running,
so on subsequent logins, users get badly confused about the lack of
any buttons to click on.

The computers in question are only used in the evenings, only once or
twice a week, and the users in question seem to not be very technical,
so I'm not sure that I'll ever get details from them about when or
under what circumstances the panel is going away.

Is there a way to enable any logging for the panel, to find out when
and why it's dying?

Is there a way to disable the session manager, to make sure that the
panel always runs on login?  It looks like editing
/etc/xdg/xfce4/xinitrc would work, but that's not flagged as a config
file in the RPM I've been using (from CentOS Extras), which suggests
that it's really not intended to be done.

Any other recommendations for handling this problem?

Thanks.

Josh Kelley