I've been dealing with this annoying bug in Gnome: Panel drawers take 3 seconds to open. This bug is tracked here . I've found a small help to this bug here : I found a setting in gconf-editor, but I was only able to set the animation speed to "fast". if I completely disabled animations, the drawer would appear over the top panel, instead of the bottom right where its supposed to be. To change the speed, open gconf-editor, navigate to apps->panel->toplevels->panel_0 there you can change the key for animation to fast. (your draw may have a different name, depending on your added panel elements - I think O_o ) Hope that helps.