I have been trying different things to fix the problem of starting of guardmedm from a sitemap which in turn was started from a panel icon. Following Keith's system I configured the icon to run a script to start MEDM instead of running it directly and it seem to have fixed the problem. If you are logged in as controls and need the new configuration you will have to log out and log back in again. 

I was not able to print the error of why a directly launched sitemap was unable to run guardmedm. I tried using fie paths in full or redirecting stderr to a file to no avail. If I ran within a terminal to get stderr printed it started working.