It should be trivial to write a fix based on
http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-setti … b86148388a

I'll see if I have some spare time tomorrow to write a patch for it.

EDIT: Created http://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7014

The files
  ~/.config/xfce4/Xcursor.xrdb
  ~/.config/xfce4/Xft.xrdb
are being created correctly, but the problem seems to be in the way they are being passed to xrdb. Xfsettingsd creates the files and then passes them to xrdb by running "xrdb -nocpp -merge <filename>". The command xrdb is executed asynchronously using g_spawn_command_line_async. Because of this, xfsettingsd may detach before it has set up the configuration. Other parts of xfce4 may even get started without them seeing all the configuration. In some situations some of the configuration didn't appear with "xrdb -query" at all, which would indicate some sort of race condition.

A short sh script I used for testing:

xfsettingsd
while true; do
    xrdb -query
    sleep 0.1
done

Fixing it requires a bit too much work for me right now, so I'm going to work around it by merging the created files using xrdb once again after xfsettingsd is started. Anyone else noticed this?