A debian user reported that verve-focus didn't work anymore. It seems linked to upgrade to Xfce 4.6.2 so it might be panel or xfwm related. Focus mode is set to “focus follow mouse”, it seems to work fine in “click to focus” mode.
I can confirm this on my Gentoo system as well. It only occurs with Focus Follows Mouse and not with the Click to Focus option.
I'm seeing this here also... another user reports it affects the xfce4-websearch-plugin as well. See: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=630964
According to bug 6649 it also affects the dict-plugin.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 6649 ***