Comment 72 for bug 527267

As a workaround you can remove this applet indicator and almost all icons from it are able to stand up by themselves in the old tray, except for the envelope one and the volume indicator. But you can grab the pulseaudio-mixer-applet to replace the volume icon.
http://www.webupd8.org/2010/04/pulseaudio-mixer-applet-lets-you-change.html
So you can get all your space back and still see batery, network, and so on...

It is ironic that they stated the new design is to save more space, but once removed and went back to the old behavior i have MORE space than with the new applet... meaning the purpose failed to be accomplished at least for some users like me, using Ubuntu on a netbook.