Xfce4 was installed on this computer last evening, along with the xfce4-goodies package on Arch Linux/PPC. The problem is t, hat the charge reported by the Battery Applet is incorrect. It is possible to 'cat /proc/pmu/battery_0' and get accurate battery levels, from which it is easy to determine the charge of the battery, and /proc/pmu/info to know if the AC adapter is plugged in. The version of the applet is 0.5.1, and Xfce is 4.6.1.
This is a duplicate of bug #3476 Basically, you should try to look at xfce4-power-manager.
Marking as such. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 3476 ***