Making gnome panels hidden by default on startup?

["T. H." <truxxon googlemail com>]

Hello all,

I'm trying to customize my gnome desktop to be as uncluttered as possible.

Does anyone know how to configure the gnome panels so that they will start up in the hidden state?

Of course, I know that one can right-click on the panel and choose to autohide; and also that I can ask it to provide the show/hide buttons on its side. But the autohide still leaves an ugly strip on the screen (is it possible to force this strip to be zero pixels high?); and I have to manually click on the show/hide buttons after every boot in order to hide the panel.

I'd much rather force the panel to start already in the hidden state (with only the tiny show/hide button on the left corner visible), so that I would use the show/hide buttons only to show the panel (in the few cases where alt+f2 is not enough ;).

Any thoughts on that? What do you do in order to reduce the clutter in your gnome desktops?

Thanks for any answers,

Truxxon