Drawing on the Background

What I want to do is show the current CPU usage as a part of the background, like you can do in Gentoo. I have 2 ideas for this, one of them simply being drawing on the background. Is this even possible? I haven't even seen any functions for this.

My second idea is creating a window and somehow making the whole thing transparent, and keeping it in the background. I know that the Windows Sidebar does something like this with the widgets, where you can take them and drag them around the desktop.

So, the question is, how would I go about achieving the affect I want to create.

I think you can do it this way... Get the DC for desktop. then create a memory DC and draw into it whatever you want. after that, just use blitting function like TransparentBlt() to blit it onto the desktop DC...

The desktop will erase your drawing whenever it do repaints.. so you had to handle it.. :)