Hi,
i'm using kgpanels + bartender + buttonfacade as a threesome for a long time now and i never had the issue you described above. Might be an issue when it was back in beta or something, but now it works splendidly.
for chat i can highly recomment Prat
wonderfull addon with an amazing choice of feautures ^^.
don't know if xperl still works, i think it does. But i switches to Lui a few weeks ago (also bartender + kgpanels + buttonfacade in the package) and its also completely errorfree.
Pitbull is a frequently used unitframe addon in compilations, combined with grid.
I hope my comment helped you somewhat ^^