In the past half hour or so, there are some new packages, including lxpanel, that have made major improvements with the problem. I can now get a working panel at login, but to get it, I had to add "@lxpanel" to ~/,config/lxsession/LXDE/autostart. That never had to be there, before.
Also, my key combinations (such as Super+w to open the web browser) no longer work. It seems they have made many changes to the way LXDE works.
Tim