Programmatically rescanning desktop or creating launcher

[Jose Solorzano <jose solorzano metamata com>]

Hello.
I've been trying to find out how to create a desktop
launcher from a program or script, without much luck.
When I manually create a launcher file under 
~/.gnome-desktop, the icon does not show up
until the Rescan Desktop menu is clicked. I have
also tried a few of the gnome_desktop_entry APIs,
but these also seem to require rescanning the desktop.
I also looked at the source for gnome-core-1.0.55,
particularly panel/launcher.c, but it looks like
quite a bit of source is needed to create a launcher
using C APIs. Is there a simple and stable API or 
script, available under RedHat 6.0, that can help me?

Thanks in advance,
--Jose