I cannot figure out how to remove the padding and/or margin on the QMainWindow central widget. In fact, it is not the widget itself, it's really the QMainWindow central area. Whatever I pass to setCentralWidget( whatever ), it will always put a padding around it, such as illustrated in the attached pic.

In this example, I have simply changed the background color in the Qt 4.5.0 demo "mainwindow". It illustrates perfectly what I'm talking about : the widget passed to setCentralWidget has a dark grey bg, and the dock separators have a blue bg. See the gap between the main grey area (widget background, no padding, no margin, no spacing) and the separator ?



What I want is to remove all but the bottom docks, and put a banner right at the top of the central widget. The banner needs to expand all the way to the right/left/top of the window, floating right below the toolbar.

Any assistance / guidance would be greatly appreciated. This is a work project that is due in a few days and must be presented to the public as a demo app