FWIW, I am trying to embed a gtk scrolledwindow inside a carbon application. The gtk scrolledwindow in turn, has another foreign Cocoa widget inside.
Alarm bells sound.
I thought that what we have to do with Ardour (embed Carbon windows inside GTK/Quartz (Cocoa) windows) was bad enough. This is so much worse that I would strongly recommend you to just stop. In Ardour's case, we ceased to support Carbon for our 64 bit builds, because (a) Apple declared Carbon dead more than 15 years ago (b) in recent OS X releases, it really is nearing full death.
(you can probably tell from that gtksharp_object_newv I am using gtksharp).
*plus* gtksharp?
You need to realize that you're using a combination of technologies that I am almost certain makes you the ONLY person on the planet to be doing so?