lol. No, thanks...

I know about flashing skippy-xd and had the same problem. In a few days Telescope (task switcher) will be usable in alpha version and you will able to use it...

I don't think that you can place more than 7 applets in the statusbar. May be you can find something in /theme/%themename%/gtk-2.0/gtkrc but I didn't find anything about nomber of applets...

It's possible if developer made his application fullscreen by default.