I have the American keyboard laytout as my default layout, and I also
use the French layout as well. Often times my keyboard shortcut to
switch between the two layouts no longer works. When I check to see what
happened in the xfce4-xkb-plugin settings it either shows that only the
American keyboard layout is there or the keyboard shortcut is no longer
selected, or both. I have been unable to figure out exactly what causes
this, but so far it doesn't seem to be anything specific, just after
some time passes. Sometimes it is after I restart, sometimes it is just
after a certain amount of time has passed. I have to readd the French
layout everyday and it is becoming extremely tedious, as I use it very
often. Please get this fixed ASAP. Thank you very much.

This is a know upstream limitation/bug, annonying as hell. Even
documented in /usr/share/doc/xfce4-xkb-plugin/README. To work around
this, (/usr/share/doc/xfce4-xkb-plugin/README), set
"never_modify_config" to "true" in
~/.config/xfce4/panel/xkb-plugin-??.rc and use /etc/default/keyboard
to configure multiple layouts. The relevant part I am using there:

XKBMODEL="pc105"
XKBLAYOUT="us,cz"
XKBVARIANT="altgr-intl,qwerty"
XKBOPTIONS="grp:alt_shift_toggle,compose:menu,terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp,grp_led:scroll"

Dear Maintainer,

I have had this problem for quite some time now. I have finally be able
to pinpoint what is causing the problem (or at least one thing that is
causing the problem). It appears that when I plugin my headset (and also
when I unplug it) I get errors and I am able to switch between layouts
for a very short time until it removes all other keyboard layouts. I
then either have to restart xfce4-xkb-plugins or manually reset the
extra keyboard layouts that I wish to use. I have included a strace I
ran on the process while I plugged in my headset. It also appears that
pressing any key after this causes these errors in strace to happen for
each key stroke.

FWIW

it is REALLY annoying and pretty much rendering this plugin unusable...
having workaround is good but I wish it could be really fixed for the wheezy...
checked upstream git and I guess resolution boiled down to

fb667951f66a05b87949b3eaf9e7c04697899fea
Author: Igor Slepchin <igor.slepchin@gmail.com>  2012-07-17 16:13:40
Committer: Igor Slepchin <igor.slepchin@gmail.com>  2012-07-24 15:38:38
Follows: 0.5.4.3

    Remove configuration of keyboard layouts.

    Keyboard layouts are moved to xfce4-keyboard-settings.
    The management of layouts per application/window
    is still handled by this plugin.

    Compose key configuration is gone for now; might get reinstated
    in xfce4-keyboard-settings.

    This fixes bug 5476 (together with a corresponding commit
    to xfce4-settings).


unfortunately changes in xfce4-settings were not as atomic and there is a
series of related commits (if I got it right).

But I guess someone could consider this issue 'fixed-upstream'

Dear Maintainer,
I frequently would like to switch keyboard layouts, and the xfce4-xkb-plugin would perfectly fit my needs, if it worked.
But after some random time - about some minutes - the configuration is always resetted to only US layout.
On the net, I have read something about a conflict between xkb's own config and the main config used for the Applications->Settings->Keyboard
tool in xfce4.
I do not know if the bug is fixed in the testing release. I tried installing the package from the testing release, but that wouldnt work
because of too many conficts with the stable distribution.
This is the single most annoying bug in xfce4, so if it was fixed in testing, I would very much appreciate an update of the current stable
version.
Best Regards
D. Rothe