small icon panel

I just upgraded from 3.3.1 to the new 6.0 alpha 1 & its a great improvement. I am just trying to put my desktop arangement back to something similar to what I had in 3.3.1 & have suceeded in everything except creating a panel with small icons. On 3.3.1 there was a panel next to "K" menu button on the left of the sceen that contains a collection of small icons. I searched the forums & all I could find was this http://www.mepis.org/node/8320 .
I tried what it said but it didn't work for me. I went to control center panel,apearance,advanced & enabled aplet handles as visable. where do i go after that to change the icon sizes to small? I can only see an option to select small that affect the whole panel.