Compiz and vanishing icons in kicker

Compiz tends to interfere with other startup processes, especially the kicker icons - in Xanthippe's case everything vanished except fusion-icon. If you start compiz with compiz-manager, there is a simple solution:
Insert a wait statement right at the beginning of the compiz-manager script (/usr/bin/compiz-manager), which should take care of any processes started right before compiz. In my case, an arbitrary number of icons still got eaten, so I added a sleep statement before that:

sleep 5
wait
ARCH=`arch`
if [ $ARCH == "x86_64" ]; then
      LIB=lib64
else
     LIB=lib
fi
...

Bash wait and sleep statements
The wait statement waits for the termination of a specific job (process ID or job spec given as argument). With no argument given, it waits for all processes to finish (that's what we did with compiz-manager). See the help wait shell command.
sleep n just delays the execution of your script by n seconds. More information in man sleep.