daperl: Oh I would very much like to get non-stock icons in there.

I think the next step would be to figure out how to run .desktop files. Is there a command line that takes a .desktop file as a parameter and then executes the .desktop file?

And yes, nested menus are the logical continuation of this project. If I do a good enough job here, this could be useful in many places: it is a generic GTK python app that puts a menu in the system tray which can run arbitrary commands... I can see a few uses for that beyond my chroot-busting use-case.