[SLL] changing gnome application menus in RHEL 6

[William Kreuter]

I'm installing RHEL 6.2 on new equipment.  I decided 
to abandon my twelve-year-old copy of fvwm and 
migrate to gnome desktop, mostly as it comes out of 
the box.

Documentation seems appallingly sparse and to some 
extent inaccurate.  I want to simply add a few items 
to the "applications" menu.  It's trivial enough to 
add an application launch to the panel itself -- but 
I don't see what rhel 6 provides for altering a
drop-down menu.
I think I could do it by messing with .menu files, 
but isn't there some straightforward way to do this 
interactively from userland?  It looks like there is 
in Ubuntu and perhaps CentOS.

Billy