I am a bit of a newb, to linux, and I have been tying to figure out how people can get a program to run in the background of their display manager, as in getting a battery monitoring or network monitoring program to pipe continous info to a specific place in the background (like the upper right or something). Thanks!

You could just open a small xterm window and run the command line from within that.

dont know what distro your using so dont know what you have.. but 'gkrellm' is included in slackware and might be like something your thinking, to load it i just select it from a menu or type 'gkrellm &' at a terminal. the '&'/ampersand symbol means to run it in the background, so i can close the terminal i loaded the program from, while keeping the program loaded.

btw, i think your use of the term 'pipe' is incorrect

you did not specify, no.
you asked for how to have the program run in the background.. and that is how.
however, to have the program display information and have it integrated into your wallpaper, i do not know how, as i have never wanted it so havent looked
i guess im of no further use here, heh.

i guess you could take a look at gDesklets (gnome) or SuperKaramba (kde) for easy integration like that

I have seen a lot of screen shots from various distro's showing this kind of thing.. (a compile or log montior seemingly merged with the desktop) most people (from what I have seen) do it with one of the fancier term programs (aterm is a popular choice) and then just run the term program with the appropriate commandline switches to set it transparent,borderless, and no scroll bars.. Presto looks like the output is part of the wallpaper.

I played with it a bit and found it more a novelty then a useful thing to do as depending on the background things can sometimes be hard to read. Also it can be annoying to move without a border.

Hope this helps
Freemor