well, i wrote an article about this on linuxian, and i'll use dA to submit a translated to english version

so - i think every GNOME-user knows this problem - the menu bar on the panel (applications, places, system) is great, but with it enabled, you can't shrink the panel to less than 24px height. of course you could disable the icons in menus, but - then you don't have icons

well, i have a quick-dirty workaround for that. just save an icon you want to use with the dimensions you want (for example, you want a 19px high panel, so you would use a 19x19px icon) as start-here.png in the 16x16/places/ folder of your icon theme (usually /home/**username**/.icons/**icontheme-name**/). then create a hardlink to this icon in the 24x24/places folder with

ln -s /home/**username**/.icons/**iconthemename**/16x16/places/start-here.png /home/**username**/.icons/**iconthemename**/24x24/places/start-here.png

^{of course this goes on one line, my journal just isn't wide enough}

of course you have to delete start-here.png in the 24x24/places folder before you do this.

now you should be able to shrink the panel down to the size of your new icon

Thankyous:

~ReijiK for featuring HP DV-5 Icon at Icon Showcase
~EvilSideBG for featuring
Auroralicious GTK
scrot.2009.05.06 - the big x
screen.090401 - fvwm
screen.090323 - VPR
screen.090317
screen.090316
mint
at Customix.org