Home Depot’s shareholders meeting, in Atlanta on May 24, will also consider a proposal to hammer out compensation concerns. At last year’s meeting, investors angry about Nardelli’s salary were outraged to find the directors absent and shareholders’ questions curtailed. This time, according to company spokesman Jerry Shields, “the directors will be present and there will be ample time for lots and lots of questions.” Some of those questions will probably be about the $210 million Nardelli received when he departed in January. But Home Depot’s goal for the 2007 meeting is to return in spirit to the good feelings that characterized its annual events when founders Bernard Marcus and Arthur Blank were at the helm.

There was also some unpleasantness in East Hanover, New Jersey, on April 26, when Altria held its annual meeting. On the table: a shareholder proposal called for the company to get out of the tobacco business by 2010. Smokers who fumed over the idea had to do so outside. New Jersey state law prohibits lighting up inside the building.

Over at Wal-Mart’s shareholders meeting, set for June 1 (with a 7 a.m. start time!), attendees should ready themselves for another religious-revival-like event. Each year, the company’s executives roam the stage like M.C.’s and work the crowd of more than 15,000 (mostly employees) into a lather, repeatedly invoking the Wal-Mart cheer—a call-and-response spelling of the company’s name, with the hyphen in the middle referred to as a squiggly and accompanied with playful butt shaking.

What happens outside Wal-Mart’s gathering is likely to be just as raucous. In recent years, a diverse parade of protestors has marched on the day of the company’s annual meeting. The National Council of Women’s Organizations, the Sheet Metal Workers’ National Pension Fund, the Teamsters union, the Raging Grannies, and others have all staged protests there for one reason or another.

Will the demonstrators be back this year? Probably. Despite Wal-Mart’s efforts to rebrand itself as kinder to workers and gentler toward the environment, it remains a prime target for protestors. To anticipate any unwanted guests, Wal-Mart, according to a Wall Street Journal report, has conducted surveillance on shareholders submitting resolutions for its coming annual meeting. Lee Scott, Wal-Mart’s C.E.O., denied the report on April 20. In a letter to stockholders, he wrote that “no such surveillance occurred and that no information regarding any shareholder proponent was obtained improperly or through intrusive means.”

Whether or not the spying took place, Wal-Mart’s investors will have a lot to discuss. There are 13 shareholder proposals on the table this year.

This may well be the last spring when investors’ mailboxes will be crammed with documents including the full texts of shareholder proposals. Beginning in July, companies will be able to simply send postcards announcing that annual reports and proxy materials are available online. You may not have noticed, but nearly all of this spring’s proxy ballots include a box you can check if you’d like to continue to receive hard copies. So far, according to Chuck Callan of Broadridge (formerly part of Automatic Data Processing), which handles nearly all proxy vote responses, investors prefer hard copies to electronic ones when given a choice.

Shareholders who elect to receive paper documents, of course, won’t have to rely on fickle Mother Nature to provide clues when next spring arrives.