I apologize in advance for the length of this... I tend to be wordy...

I've searched and searched, and can't quite find the answer to what I want to do. I'm hoping someone here will be able to help out.

I've got two machines: one running Red hat 8 and one running Red hat 9. For both, I'd like to change the organization of Red Hat's menu. I'm trying to accomplish two things:[list=1][*]A menu on equal level with "applications"[*]User modifiable Menu[/list=1]
To clarify what I mean by "on equal level" I need to describe what I did to the default configuration. I added a "main menu" panel by right-clicking the default panel that Red hat creates (the default panel is a side panel located at the bottom of the screen). The Main Menu panel resides at the top of the screen and is relatively thin. I hope that's enough to clear up where I am now; I can try to elaborate more if necessary. Anyway, on the main menu panel, there's the normal Red Hat menu that drops down a list of applications. Immediately next to it is another drop-down menu titled "Actions". I want to create yet another menu next to that to be a similar drop-down list. That's what I mean when I say "on equal level"; I want a separate drop down menu (not a drawer) and I do not want it contained within the standard applications menu.

I'd also like to have it user-customizable; a personal menu of sorts. As I understand it, the main application menu is read-only for all users, and to enable users to modify it would give them the ability to just trash everything. I want to leave the original menu as-is as a backup in case they screw something up.

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So now, on to what I've tried. My head is still aching after beating my head against a wall, because it seems there are two collections of GNOME menu files in a Red Hat distribution. There are files as specified by GNOME documentation in /usr/gnome/etc/gnome/-vfs-2.0./vfolders and /usr/gnome/share/gnome/vfolders. However, there are also similar/identical copies of these files in /etc/X11/desktop-menus/ and /usr/share/desktop-menu-files. I'm assuming the second group of files/directories are in place to support Red Hat's Bluecurve thing. My editing attempts were wasted for the GNOME-proper locations. There seemed to be no effect. My changes in the Red Hat areas did have an effect, but caused the panel to crash. I manually edited the applications.menu file and included a new <Folder> description at the same hierarchical level as the applications entry. That killed the entire menu. So I assume the file format expects only one top-level folder definition, and my new one overwrote the regular one (just a guess). I made the appropriate supporting files (*.directory for instance). I just can't figure out how to tell the system what I want to do, if it's even possible.

So now, I've put the file back as it was originally and everything is working as it was. Any help/pointers would be greatly appreciated.