I somehow doubt it, as it's not a KDE app, but I could well be wrong. I've always had it up on the desktop, on all my distros. I have a whole bunch of distros on my 3 machines, and use static IP addresses for them. There is a nice plugin "gkrellmip", that displays the IP address of the current OS that is booted up, so I find it quite usefull when wanting to transfer files via FTP, or want to SSH into a machine, as the IP addresses of all the machines are displayed on the desktop.
Of course, it shows up in the panel, as all open desktop apps do, and you can obviously minimise it out of the way, but I'm sure that, that's not really what you're looking for.
You're right, it's not quite what I'm looking for. Thanks anyway -- I'll probably just wait until 4.2. -- Best, Leonid