Created attachment 69728 [details] Screenshot of main panel showing the shrunken taskbar. When Plasma automatically restarts after one of its crashes, the taskbar shrinks to half its size. Please see attached screenshot. If you manage to make plasma crash again, the taskbar will shrink even further. Of course it could be that the system tray is expanding, please feel free to reassign if I've attributed the cause to the wrong component.
Created attachment 69906 [details] Showing the expanded systay and extremely shrunken taskbar after a second Plasma crash/restart
Updating the component to systemtray since it looks pretty clear that that is what's expanding and filling the space.
This bug still present in 4.8.4. Happily plasma seems less unstable these days but when it does restart (e.g. if I have to kill it after a networking-related desktop freeze) these symptoms still occur.
I can confirm this bug. It is actually system tray that is expanding, you can see that by the placement of the new message indicator (i). The empty space in the system tray is filled by dead „statusnotifieritems“ - please see the attachment that I added, where the system tray configuration dialog is open showing all the dead items. As for me, it happens after wakeup from suspend. But it does not happen every time. I use KDE 4.8.3, official Kubuntu Precise packages.
Created attachment 71861 [details] System tray open, showing the dead items after the second plasma crash
It seems to me that the bug 300005 is related to this one, possibly - a dublicate. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 300005 ***