Guru needed: SysTray icons

Good evening everyone.

This is not the first time I crawled google and the forums up-and-down and yet found no answer. My goal is to write a full desktop-replacement and one of the most important desktop thingies surely is they TrayIcon bar where you can access ICQ, WinAmp and get notified about new mails.

So the big question is, how can I fully replace this bar? I know it's no program you could replace, so there must be some WM hooking or similar. The first step would be to catch the add/edit/remove messages and handle those requests. The second step is forwarding mouse events to the corresponding programs, eg. so WinAmp can display it's popup menu when you click the icon. A third step would be to draw the icons you got from the apps, but that's for later. For now I'd be happy to just use my own icons.

Please note that the program is going to replace the shell (explorer.exe) so catching the existing TrayIcons would not work, because they wouldn't exist then.

Appreciating any help,

Fox