unable to chang background color programatically under xfce4

[Dr. Christoph Gille]

Currently I am using wmaker but I consider to change to xfce because I
find it more powerful than gnome and kde. I have debian 5.0.


The only problem that I have is, that I would like to be able to
change background color programatically.

My scripts are signalling success and failure by changing background
color. The advantage is that even when I am on a different virtual
desktop I can still notice when the script terminates successfully or
fails. I found this better than acoustic signals.

The scripts contain a command like  xsetroot -solid green.

However, when xfdesktop is running, xsetroot fails to change
background color.  It seems as xfdesktop is painting the desktop and
prevents other programs like xsetroot and xbanner from  writing to the
desktop.

Does someone know a solution?
Many thanks!