Background options in panel properties (transparency, custom image) do not apply to widgets

I can verify this is true. With the Human theme the leftmost (Menu Bar) and rightmost (Notification Area, Date/Time, Indicator Area) portions of the upper panel do indeed become transparent. This also affects the Trash Icon and Window List applet on the bottom panel as well.

All of these areas become transparent when selecting the "Human" or "Human-Clearlooks" Gtk themes. The problem seems to be when you have either the "Radiance" or "Ambiance" Gtk theme selected.

The themes define a panel background image , this is by design.

The issue here is this line in the gtkrc of the themes ,

 bg_pixmap[NORMAL] = "panel_bg.png"

Users who wish to use a fully transparent panel can remove or comment-out the line from the gtkrc
/usr/share/themes/Radiance/gtk-2.0/gtkrc
/usr/share/themes/Ambiance/gtk-2.0/gtkrc

This would probably be a bug which would be a "Wont Fix" , since the panel is designed to use the background.

above fix makes no difference to certain icons that should appear transparent in the notification area when progs are running, but do not.... such as checkgmail, banshee and mail-notification...see attached screenshot

As a suggestion, the specified background could also give the entire panel coverage. Although that may lead to bug reports of 'transparency not working for main panel'.

@macstevejb: Your bug is not of dup of this one , it is a dup of Bug #403135

Confirmed. I'm used to transparent panels on Karmic over several monitors. Testing Lucid and setting the transparency I found that the menus and the indicator/notification panels remain opaque.

Shouldn't program launchers and the main menu (see screenshot) be opaque then as well? This is on a machine upgraded from Karmic.

From a user point of view, selecting "transparent panel" and not getting a transparent panel is a bug, not a wishlist.
If this "works as designed", then the design is should be fixed.

Either the theme shouldn't use its own background picture
bg_pixmap[NORMAL] = "panel_bg.png"
or that background should be transparent
or the transparency option should disappear when using this theme, as it doesn't work.

The bug's importance sould be "low", at least.

Then isn't it a bug in gnome-panel?

In fact, adding

288a289
> bg_pixmap[NORMAL] = "panel-bg-dark.png"

to Dust theme (/usr/share/themes/Dust/gtk-2.0/gtkrc) results in the same behavior - no transparency for widgets. The text in the panel configuration dialog specifically lets the user choose between a "design decision" ("use system theme"), custom picture and transparency. In fact, custom picture option is broken too - widgets still use their own background.

I know this is a duplicate bug report of #349774, but the fix given here by 'Vish' is not given there, so in order to give his fix reference, I am posting my comment here.

The fix given by 'Vish' worked for me. After making the changes he/she suggested, I had to 'restart' my computer to take it in effect.