Removing all desktop icons in 2.6.0?

[Lloyd Zusman <ljz asfast com>]

I haven't been able to find any information about the following
question.  I hope that I'm coming to the right place to get an answer
... or at least for someone to point me to the documentation that covers
the case that I mention here:

I'm using Gnome 2.6.0 under Fedora Core 2, and I'd like to use all the
features of Gnome except for one: I want no icons at all on my desktop.

I know that I can get rid of them as follows:

  rm -rf ~/Desktop
  touch ~/Desktop
  chmod 000 ~/Desktop

... and then log out and log in again.

But that's an ugly hack, and it causes an error box to pop up when I log
back in.

I looked through everything that is changeable via gconf-edit, but
nothing there seemed to have anything to do with eliminating desktop
icons.

I know that I can switch to KDE or to use a different window manager,
but I'd like to use Gnome if at all possible.

Is there a recommended and proper way to remove all desktop icons under
Gnome without my having to resort to the extreme measures that I
outlined above?

Thanks in advance.

-- 
 Lloyd Zusman
 ljz asfast com
 God bless you.