Looks like lxpanel is only running the networking applet in the top right of the screen which fails to work after my laptop goes to sleep. I guess I should have done more reading. Thanks for your help.

I'm having problems adding buttons to lxpanel. I've installed vsido x86_64. I tried right clicking lxpanel but that does nothing. I looked in lxappearance which doesn't allow me to add applicatiions to the panel so I edited ~/.config/lxpanel/default/panels/panel and added:

Button {
      id=/usr/share/applications/gimp.desktop
}

I log out and back in and the panel stays the same. I'll keep searching for an answer but if any of you know what I'm doing wrong please let me know. thanks