It amazing what you can't find when you look...
I have a lab. mixed machines of all description.
most multiboot SE 9.3 or 10, some kinda Fedora , or XP.
They change a lot.
Having gone through the usual VM and wine phases,
I settled on the the old trick of running CygwinX rootless on XP, and remoting Gnome to it with nautilus turned off.
That way I get to mix&match windows, both taskbars, cut&paste, and a common Keyboard map. With similar themes, it's quite slick.
Lemme know if you want a screenshot.
However, I tend to agree with The Man, when he says Gnome is bad, and getting worse.
I'd like to use KDE instead. But. there does not seem to be an obvious way to eliminate the background. KDE doesn't wanna let you get all the way back to the root window.
I'm not sure if this is a KDE or Ice related issue. but,
Is there a way to tell KDE / Ice to NOT draw the background? like unto Gnome?
TIA