One of my last niggling issues with Ubuntu 11.04 is, as you’d expect, another remnant of Unity carried over to the Ubuntu Classic desktop. This remnant is the notification area (or ‘Systray’ to you Windows converts) not allowing all applications access to it. Below is the line you’ll need for bringing Ubuntu back to the 21st century:

gsettings set com.canonical.Unity.Panel systray-whitelist "['all']"

Thanks to the good fellows at Web UDP8 for this little piece of magic.

PS. It appears the VLC icon STILL does not always appear. There’s a question posted on the VLC forums about this issue and it looks as though it’s due to an incompatibility between QT4 and Gnome. Stay tuned for further developments on this issue.