With 1.54.5 in 1920x1080 on a single monitor with Standard disabled and Classic menus, the Control button would still prevent me from selecting sub-buttons, but not every time (?!?) - if I kept at it eventually the buttons would stay there one time, long enough for me to bring up the Options window to change to Compact menu structure. That seems to work so far (I have Standard Panel Display Mode still turned off).
Switching back to Surround mode (5760x1080), so far everything seems pretty good as long as I keep Standard disabled and use Compact menus. I did notice when trying to use the Panels option to make some of the windows visible again (switching to Surround placed some of the windows off-screen - had to use Panels to bring them back to where I could then use the mouse to place them where I wanted) that two things happened - one, at some point while editing the panel positions, the Panels screen reverted back to the standard color scheme (Orange - I use a blue-ish scheme), and two, several of the panels didn't take their repositioned coordinates immediately - I changed the numbers to a visible range but they stayed invisible on "Show". I had to close and reopen the Panels screen and re-edit the positions...the second time I did this, it took and I was able to reposition them. I think it was Credit Balance and Star System Summary (I should have taken better notes!). Even now when I launch the Panels screen it's coming up Orange for me (a minor issue, obviously, but I thought it worth mentioning in case it's indicative of greater issues).
Let me know what you want me to try next (a beta fix version maybe?) - debugging is actually pretty fun when you really like the end product! Oh, and I sent you a donation too - money talks!