It's really common for me.
I have... lets see.

Always:
Wifi/Connections
Chat/rtcomm
Bluetooth (When in 'Online' Mode) (sometimes off) (I do use bluetooth a lot)
Advanced Power Monitor
Advanced Backlight-Volume
Application Menu
App Switcher (Because without notification of chat's and emails it sucks. This really needs a fix)
MiniGPSD (might remove... doesn't work with Navit)

Others:
Vagalume (Wish I could hide it to the tray)
Xchat (kind of annoying in the tray)

and since that is 8, I almost always have the arrow which has made me restart hildon-desktop... which apparently unmounted my sd cards, internal and external (only partition 2 of my cloned os on mmc2)
I'm not sure if it's version specific. Right now I just reflashed and am going to test out some software in extras-devel. Some software that I know, like advanced power and minigpsd. Not just random stuff. If it dies I can repartition and reclone the clean flash os i have on the original fs. I'm about to do the icon thing myself actually. I just installed ssh so I can get the .ani file. It'll be quicker and I'll suffer less =]

Edit: .ani files are linux apparently. .cur are for windows. I'm on windows and gimp doesn't read it, and the plugin for it that supports it is outdated and doesn't work with 2.6.8... so you should PM me a link to those spinners or upload them to like mediafire in a zip and lemme get them :]
ASAP!