making skinnable apps with gtk+

[Simon Hookway <lord_seoman hotmail com>]

first off, thanks to huzheng, although i couldn't get your example
working properly it did point me to a working solution. For some reason
the pixmap rendered to the background but then vanished as if something
was covering it up. Whenever i resized the window the pixmap would show
during resize and then promptly disappear.

Anyway, instead i render the pixmap to an image and then combine the
mask to make parts of the window transparent and finally take off the
window decorations.

In the process i had to upgrade to gtk2 but that went fine except for
pango not installing properly (i had to make the lib link manually) then
gtk not finding the pango library even tho it was there. :)

Back to my app, i have a image (inside a eventbox) that i render buttons
on, when the mouse moves over a button region i render a different image
on that area and de-render it when the mouse pointer leaves the area. Is
there a better way of doing this? Such as an event that only happens in
a certain area of my window.

Is it possible to place a widget in a certain location in my window? 
How can i place text in an area of my pixmap?

cheers,

Simon