Well, it does seem to be a font issue. I set "AntiAliasing = false" in the global file and the panel started up. Unfortunately, Konsole now has a much smaller and harder-to-read font... I'm going to play with my X font settings (I'm not using any Windows TTFs... Thanks for the suggestion, though, Franz) and see if I can reach an acceptable compromize with kicker ;-) Later, -Chris