At work, we're in the process of migrating to Red Hat from a Solaris system. The Red Hat system is using a Gnome/Sawfish setup while the old Solaris system used (I assume) twm. Twm was capable of creating a box that had an icon for every running process in the current workspace (similar to Red Hat's task list in a Gnome panel). The key difference was, in twm you could arrange the icons as you saw fit. It was common practice to put the icons in columns (column 1: source code, column 2: log files, etc.). I have yet to find a way to do this in Red Hat. Is it possible?

I tried removing all tasklist applets from all panels. I thought minimizing/iconifying a window would force the system to create an icon for the task on the desktop. No such luck. The window simply disappears. The only way to bring it back is through the the workspace switcher's tasklist arrow.

I've looked high and low in the configuration and didn't see anything that looked promising. Any suggestions?

Run Twm. or WindowMaker, or any othe window manager you feel like. There is no requirement to use Gnome/Sawfish for your Window Manager.

I'd experiment if I could. Unfortunately, the Gnome/Sawfish setup is provided as-is. It's not installed on our desktop. Rather, we use VNC to connect from our Windows workstations (some of our responsibilities require Windows applications, while others require a Unix/Linux environment). Since we connect through VNC, there is a separate group within the company responsible for maintaining the Red Hat environment, and I don't have priviledges to modify installed software. At least, they haven't given those priviledges yet.

Is there any chance you can use cygwin on your Windows machine instead of VNC? Cygwin has a pretty full set of GNU ports, including XFree86 4.2. You could then use ssh to connect to your remote Linux environment, redisplay the apps to your local X server running Twm, and you get the added benefit of doing it with ssh encryption instead of the relatively insecure VNC connection.
http://www.cygwin.com