I’ve just committed some code that should hopefully fix bug #172587 of the old recent-files code.
The bug was hard to track down – and for it I do own a beer to Sebastien Bacher: it appears that older versions of OpenOffice creeped unescaped & into the dot-recently-used file we use to store the recent documents. The parser code inside EggRecentModel has always been a little too fragile (a mistake I tried to avoid since the beginning of my BookmarkFile parser code, by feeding it invalid XML/XBEL streams and trying to get errors instead of crashers), and thus gnome-panel had the tendency to crash until the dot-recently-used file was deleted or corrected.
I hope to close #172587 for good before marking the whole code as deprecated: it’s personal, now.