Facing the same issue here, but just disabling the panel brings back the old Unity 3 issue, enabled-state is not inherited

So this solution is not really doable for nested panels, if you don't want to manually keep track of the state... (you don't). Still gotta try out the latest version of NGUI for potential performance-gains (currently on 3.5.1 waiting for 3.5.6), but yeah inherited enabled-state of panels would be great

(but may break to much for current users..?).