The following reference is a small extract from two books I read to become familiar with GTK programming. This is not a summary of this books but more for keeping things in mind. I hope not to hurt some license terms using some parts here. If so please write me and I will get rid of these things or prevent access with password. But for now I see no need for this. To learn such things it is necessary to read more about GTK than only read the part below.

My book recommendation:

Gconf

In the background the daemon gconfd supervise the configuration files. To stop this daemon use:

 gconftool-2 --shutdown

and to start it again:

 gconftool-2 --spawn

To get all values:

 gconftool-2 -R

Read a value:

 gconftool-2 -g /path/to/value/as/dektop/gnome/...

To set a value:

 gconftool-2 -t string -s /desktop/gnome/../dir value

or use other types as bool, float or int.

See python section for an example to supervise a certain value.

Gtk

Gnome and Gtk mixed

install package devhelp
install package glade for clickable development of application windows
glade for windows
- with link to "Gtk+/Win32 Development Environment"
- with link to "Gtk+/Win32 Runtime Environment"
http://wingtk.sourceforge.net/
How to Develop Win32 Software with gtk+ 2, glade, and MinGW
GTK+ / Gnome Application Development
GTK+ (not GIMP) for Windows