It seems to me like the deskbar admins have taken steps to get deskbar to work on gnome 2.10 - I can get it to compile and such on my FC4 machine (haven't tried running it though, I'm still not too comfortable with installing self-compiled applets) Any chance of pushing out the latest release to Extras?
I'm working on both FC4 and Rawhide. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 169884 ***