I've set up my desktop so that I have a classic style gnome-panel at the bottom to show my active applications with a main menu button on the side. The problem is that the panel stretches across the whole width of the screen and over the launcher, making it difficult to access the icons at the bottom.

I could untick the expand option in the panel's properties, but there's no way to resize it so it takes up the rest of the right part of the screen, which is what I want. And if enough applications are open it stretches all the way anyway.

I don't want to auto-hide it either. What I'd like to do is make the launcher go over the top of the panel so I can fully access both the launcher and the panel at the same time. If it's possible, how do I do this?