configuring metacity w/out gnome on RHEL 3

[Luke Meyer <luke daeron com>]

Let me start with what I'm actually trying to achieve, because it's
always possible there's a better way than what I'm trying :-)   

I'm trying to achieve a vaguely kiosk-ish setup where the user clicks
on an icon to start a program, say oowriter.  That program runs, taking
up the entire screen, no panels, menus, or other icons to distract.
When it finishes, you go back to the beginning.

The way I've implemented this on RHEL 3 Desktop is with the gdm face
browser -- one user per program and no password.  Each user has a
.Xclients something like this:

metacity &
oowriter

The problem is that if the user clicks the minimize icon (by accident or
otherwise), the window goes away and cannot be retrieved.  I've actually
tried this on Fedora Core 1 and there you can use Alt-Tab to retrieve
your window, but not with RHEL 3 Desktop.  No key combinations seem to
work except Ctrl-Alt-Backspace :-)  How do I activate Alt-Tab -- and
also, how do I configure metacity to show a background image (which
would tell them to use Alt-Tab)?  Configuration seems to work only
with gnome.

I've googled around quite a bit looking for this, but no one is doing
quite the same thing with metacity as far as I can tell.  Any advice
would be appreciated.

RHEL 3 Desktop runs with gnome-desktop-2.2.2-1 and metacity-2.4.55-6.

-Luke