Desktop icons for active processes

[Nathan Wilson <coyote expletive anim dreamworks com>]

Our studio is switching over to using Linux boxes from SGI (IRIX) boxes.
One feature of the IRIX desktop environment is that active user processes
with X GUI's have separate movable icons.  Gnome has the taskbar, but I
haven't found any way to rearrange the icons within the panel or anyway to
move the tasks onto the desktop.  Several of our users apparently use this
feature to keep track of which icon represents which window.

I tried playing around with saving the session in a particular
configuration, but under the Gnome that ships with RedHat 6.2 (Gnome
1.0?) and under the version I got from a fairly recent update via
HelixCode (Gnome 1.2?) the order which the icons appear in the
task bar and the connection between name and location on the screen is
inconsistent.  Also emacs doesn't save across sessions, but xemacs
does.

The best solution I've come up with is trying to give the windows more
meaningful names, but this is a pain since the method of changing the
title is application dependent.

In any case, this isn't really what the users want since they tend to
create the window on the fly and then want to group them and rearrange
them once they are running.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Nathan Wilson
Software Developer
DreamWorks Animation