Gnome, Compiz, Metacity & AWN

I have only recently started using the Gnome desktop and found that I dont' really care for the Gnome panel at all. It's far too much like the Windows taskbar. Instead I prefer Avant Window Navigator which is available in Debian repos. I also prefer Compiz over Metacity for window management. Sure it's easy to install Compiz with apt-get but the documentation I've seen for running Compiz inside of Gnome involves launching compiz like so compiz --replace. Replace..?? Hmm....This means that you're letting Metacity start and then killing it and starting Compiz. Why start Metacity at all? Just to slow down the login? Have a look here:
/usr/share/gdm/autostart/LoginWindow/
That's where metacity is getting started from. Let's halt that and make Compiz start instead.

su
mv /usr/share/gdm/autostart/LoginWindow/metacity.desktop /usr/share/gdm/autostart/LoginWindow/metacity.desktop.orig

Now Metacity is nowhere to be found. Realize that this will affect ALL users!

What about the Gnome panel? Right click on the Gnome panel and select Delete this panel.
What's that you say? The 'Delete this panel' is greyed out!? Fear not, gconf-editor to the rescue:

Menu>System Tools>Configuration Editor (or from CLI gconf-editor)

With gconf-editor browse to:
/desktop/gnome/session/required_components/panel
Change this value from gnome-panel to avant-window-navigator
You won't see any Gnome panels and AWN launches on login.

Now you just need to start compiz.
cd ~/.config/autostart
ln -s /usr/share/applications/compiz.desktop

Changing this value to compiz did not work for some reason:

/desktop/gnome/session/required_components/windowmanager