Xfce panel config file is rewritten with old contents

I had the same problem: I wanted to copy the panel configuration from one machine to another, and it just didn't want to use the one I copied, but always used the old even though I logged out.

It turns out, even when logging out, the following process kept running under that user:

/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/xfce4/xfconf/xfconfd

I suppose this is where xfce stores its configuration at runtime. Since it kept running, it didn't see the change in the files and even overwrite it.

A bug about that is already reported it seems: https://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13445