wine users - Jul 2011 - Team Fortress and steam friends list

I haven't been able to find a way yet, but is it possible to somehow have
steam run not in a virtual desktop or at least a seperate virtual desktop than
team fortress 2? If I could alt tab or switch desktop spaces and be able to
access steam from my taskbar so I can talk to my friends in the game (since
in-game overlay doesn't work) Or join them using the steam friends options
without having to close the game everytime would be amazing.  I've tried
settings the virtual desktop to run on hl2.exe and steam.exe doesn't.  This
makes steam start up how I would like it running from my taskbar so I can access
it via the icon no matter what desktop I am on.  Then team fortress 2 starts but
its full screen and if I try to alt tab or change desktops the game freezes and
I have to kill it.  Does anyone know a way around this? Thanks!

PS (Can't find an edit button) Another option would be to somehow find a way
to alt tab WITHIN the virtual desktop to get to the steam running behind TF2?

Turns out I can run TF2 in windowed mode from its own options and have the
virtual desktop turned off and it works fine now.  Before it had to be run that
way.  However my taskbar is on top of the game but I can deal with that, much
better now than it was.