Removing the Places menu workarounds

[lists kambanaria org]

Hi guys,

Sorry for cross posting, but I am not sure which list will be more
appropriate and already have searched the Internet and looked at the
sources of gnome-vfs and gnome-panel.

What I would like to achieve is on a recent Fedora 12 system to remove the
'Places' menu.

It seems that this is not possible, however similar thing could possibly
be achieved by using the applet Menu bar - Custom menu bar, and then
editing via gconf-editor the relevant keys:

/apps/panel/objects/OBJECT/use_menu_path
/apps/panel/objects/OBJECT/menu_path

Here OBJECT stands for the exact object_[0-9]* string.

I am supposed to set use_menu_path to true, and then fiddle with menu_path.
However I cannot get my fiddling right. I supposed that menu_path respects
gnome-vfs uris (since gnome-panel links to it rather than gvfs). However
the only strings working is 'applications:/' and 'applications:' (The menu
is set to the Applications one, and the two versions change the icon.) I
could not get anything else to work, ex.: file:, file:/, file://,
file:///, file:///home/USER/Desktop, trash:/, fonts:/, computer:/.
What can I do to make this custom applet look into a particular directory
for the menu?
Furtermore: Is there a way to explicitly add a label to the icon and
change the icon of the applet?

Kind regards:
al_shopov