I'm a fvwm guy myself, so I don't know the answer, but I thought I'd point you to an article I read a few years ago in Sysadmin magazine that might give you an alternative (not a solution, but I think it's quite cool):

Gnome panel applets in perl

I know under some environments you can 'pin' a window to be always in a certain window or always on top. It's a function of the window manager, not perl. Maybe http://gnomesupport.org could help you.

HTH.