I have patched my gdm to reenable the panel and activate the power manager, and played around a bit with gconf settings to prevent things that we can't allow on a login screen, such as running browsers, mail clients or file choosers . I also included some settings that make metacity more suitable for a login screen scenario, such as having only a single workspace. I've attached a tarball containing the gconf database I ended up with. There is certainly more that needs to be done, but I think what I have now is good enough to turn the panel back on. Further work includes - making most of these settings mandatory for the gdm user - adding a gconf key to e.g. hide the power manager preferences in the menu Matthias
Attachment:
gdm-gconf.tar.gz
Description: GNU Zip compressed data