Here is a patch to make gaim work with transparent panels, by not forcing the background of its tray icon to gray. The patch updates the eggtrayicon copy to the latest upstream (which supports transparency), and makes the event box in the tray not have a visible window.
Created attachment 137476 [details] patch
Warren, I put the patch in cvs, but gaim fails to build due to unrelated errors. Can you take a look ?
FYI, the equivalent of this patch (without the regressions for older GTK+ versions) is already in upstream SVN and will be in beta4 If I can be of any help with the "unrelated errors" let me know.
Fixed in FC6 and RHEL5.