Yes, I have seen the other similar questions; if this is a duplicate please link me to the question that answer this, because none of them appear to; all appear to only address (1) of the two issues below:

There are TWO times when the sidebar will magically vanish:

1) By default when you move your cursor off it and focus on a different app.

This is fixable by setting the auto hide behaviour, as described here: How to make the Unity launcher always visible?

2) When you move a window over / under it, or maximize a window.

Even when the autohide setting is 'never' this will cause the sidebar to mysterious decide to hide itself. In fact, it doesn't appear what settings you change, this behaviour refuses to change.

This is extremely undesired behaviour.

I'm using a stock standard 11.10 install.