I posted this in the forums but the thread is marked resolved so I thought I should report a bug and let you decide if it is an issue and to see if anyone can confirm the issue (personally I don't add shortcuts this way because if I have thunar open already it is just as easy to drag and drop in thunar's left pane but it came up during testing for someone's issue).
When I drop a folder on the shortcuts it gets added to both the shortcuts plugin and thunar but thunar shows an odd name. I tried it again yesterday (May 4th, 2012) and same thing, the bookmark was added, cairo-dock showed the correct name and opened the correct folder but thunar showed random characters for the name but opened the correct folder. All I had to do was right click in thunar and rename the bookmark and everything was fine. (I just tried a number of times and sometimes the name is fine but most times there are random names and/or characters showing in thunar)
xubuntu 11.04
cairo-dock 3.0 (added using ppa)
opengl
regular xfdesktop (no compiz)
Thunar 1.2.1
I updated my system so everything is up to date for xubuntu 11.04 and tried some more testing. I haven't figured out exactly what is going on but it looks like a buffering issue. I removed all bookmarks and started from scratch (several times). If the folder name of the one I am adding is longer than the previous (which is true for the very first one regardless) I get garbage characters for a name. If the folder name is shorter than the previous then the name that gets put in contains a string from the end of the previous name. No matter what though the previous names are corrected and it is only the current one that has issues.
So for example:
If I drag and drop a folder named "Some_Folder" as the first one what I see in thunar is garbage (or most likely, sometimes it works for a few).
If I then drag and drop a folder named "Music" the first one gets fixed and now shows "Some_Folder" in the thunar pane (so it is corrected) but the second one might show as "_Folder".
If I then do one named "cat" it might show as "er" and the first 2 are fine.
Adding a few more might be ok depending on their lengths and then I might get more cycling like the "_Folder" and "er" issue. Then depending on lengths of names I might get more garbage characters. In every case it is only the current new bookmark that has issues.
To confirm more that it is a buffer issue I tried adding a bookmark from thunar to see if the buffer was reset and it was. So say from the example above I added "cat" and what showed in thunar was "er" then I added the folder "Downloads" but used thunar to drag the folder to the side pane instead of onto the shortcut plugin then the "er" would not be fixed so I would have a list in thunar that shows "Some_Folder", "Music", "er" and "Downloads". If I then start adding bookmarks again using the shortcut plugin the issue restarts from the point on but the folder "er" does not get fixed and "Downloads" does not get affected (note: the "er" folder points to "cat" and if I manually rename it then everything is fine).
So this definitely looks like a buffer issue only in the name that gets sent to the file manager but not the directory path that gets sent to the file manager (or however the bookmark gets added to the file manager bookmarks)
Hope all this makes sense, it is hard to wrap your head around unless you see it in action and even then it took me many tries to figure out what was going on.