It. happens... Not exactly sure why, but sometimes lxpanel just crashes. It's not very common, but it happend often enough for me to make a way to restart it when it does.

What I did was right click on the desktop, go to openbox-->openbox menu and added the follow under text editor in the favorite applications menu:

<item label="Text Editor">
<action name="Execute"><command>editor</command></action>
</item>
<item label="Lxpanel">
<action name="Execute"><command>lxpanel</command></action>
</item>

I saved the changes and closed the editor. Next I right click the desktop again and went to openbox-->restart. Now whenever the panel crashes, I just have to right click on the desktop and go to Favorite Applications--->Lxpanel to restart it.

Thanks Trixar_za, I tried with the lxpanel restart but after a quick blinck the taskbar disappers again and there is no way to get it back. Also the icons on the desktop go away so I think it has to be some issues with the bluefish 2.0.2 package (or some dependencies) since all comes back to normal if I remove the package.

Found also a post in the french forum regarding the same problem with bluefish 2.0.2 so probably it is a minor bug, hope it will be fixed in future releases.

Ugop