It would be very handy if Nautilus could draw its desktop icons on a transparent window, letting whatever is underneath show through. Users could then use an external program -- say, an xscreensaver hack -- to handle drawing their wallpapers without sacrificing their desktop icons.

Obviously, this would only work on systems with ARGB visuals; it's probably too much work to ask for a shaped window for each desktop icon, and that would look crummy anyway. But for users whose systems could handle it, this would also provide a way to solve bugs like this: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=48004 and this: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=147808, assuming some program could be put together to do that.