How to use third party notification area with gnome shell I'm using gnome-shell 3.0.2 on Arch Linux and I want to use AWN's notification area plugin. However when I try to activate the plugin it complains that there's already a notification area running. This is expected, of course, except that I can't find a way to disable gnome-shell's notification area. In gnome 2 I'd just right click on the notification area and select "remove from panel" - how do I do the equivalent in gnome-shell, so I can use awn's notification area (or any other third party notification area)?

At this time, you cannot. It is core functionality in the current GNOME shell.