Help! (Losing widget names)

[John Breen <locutus borg apana org au>]

I didn't get a reply to this the first time, so her goes again...

Help!

I have managed to get my widgets to reparent using the code snippet on
the gtk+ website.  That goes cool.

Unfortunately,  when I do reparent the widgets, they seem to lose the
contents of their name field.  This makes it impossible for me to use
lookup_widget to find and modify widget information.

Is there a workaround?  I'm desperate because I need to 

(1) modify the contents of the widget after reparenting it, and
(2) make sure that a second instance of the widget is not created by
running the code again.

Please Help!

TIA

John Breen