alephito, it is so strange the way the desktop resets seem to affect people differently. If I install statusbar-clock everything is fine, but when I install modest afterward I start getting desktop crashes. I don't know if it is a problem with alarmd when it has too many processes polling or what.

I am going to update statusbar-clock with a setting to explicitly turn alarms on or off. If you turn them off, you won't be able to access them through statusbar-clock AND it will no longer even poll alarmd. Hopefully this will eliminate desktop resets with the alarms set off.