Gtk gnome-background

[death deathzor com]

Dear GTK mailinglist 
I have a question in relation to integration between gnome and GTK (
not sure if this is the right place to put it) 
the problem is as follows:
I'm trying to write a application that takes over the full background in
a gnome session, now I can't use the root window feature from X because
gnome will paste its own desktop over my "desktop" so I end up with a relatively simple question namely: 
is there anyway GTK to force a application to be locked to the desktop and/or tell the window manager to do so ? ( from the application level )