I'm new to Ruby/Gtk and find it, so far, exactly what I want for a GUI. However, I have one problem that I can't seem to figure out and that has to do with setting sizes of widgets. For example, I want to create a status bar with four display areas. I can use an HBox for the container and use four status bars for the info. Works great. I can set the first three to be small for position data and the fourth one to be long for general messages. Done all the time. (there may be a better way to do this, but it works) However, if the user resizes the main window, the statusbars stretch in all directions, including height. I want only the last area to stretch and it only in width. Setting height and width_requests seem to only affect shrinking the window. I'm having the same problem with my menubar - it stretches in height when the window is resized. There has to be an easy fix to this, but so far it eludes me. Bill