just set up my netbook (acer aspire one) with arch + xmonad + gnome-session. tell me if this sounds as ridiculous to you as it does to me: i tried to disable the gnome panels, but there doesn’t seem to be a user-facing configuration option to do this. i’ll accept that, because your average gnome user isn’t going to want to and probably shouldn’t disable all the panels anyway as that’s the primary navigation method. i found the dconf entry for the panels and turned them both off by setting the value to an empty array. neat, it works! kinda. i restarted gnome and it had re-enabled both panels i’d explicitly disabled, PLUS added a new top panel which was overlaid on the existing top panel. look, if someone’s messing with dconf and disables the panels, they probably know what they’re doing. leave it alone.
and the solution?
chmod -x /usr/bin/gnome-panel
i wish i was joking.