Since both things (moving plasmoids and making the panel smaller) have worked for me for quite some time, there must be something wrong locally. I'm suspecting either a botched upgrade (meaning you think you're running 4.1 final, but actually still use rc1), or the distribution packages are broken (I am using OpenSUSE 11 myself), or some old configuration issues are plaguing you. To test the latter, you can move the .kde4 directory to kde4.back, logout and login to test with the default values and see whether these problems persist.