Is it possible to either have the plasma desktop be transparant; or launch kde without starting plasma?

The plasma wallpaper seems to cover up xmobar which I assume is drawn to the root window and has no way of doing otherwise (which I can find). (this also of course causes problems with applications which offer pseudo-transparency but no true transparency such as conky.)

I also assume that many of the kde notifications require that plasma be running. It appears there is no way to not launch plasma when loading kde. Without launching kde and setting up the kde environment, some features of some applications don't work properly - and there is no session management. It isn't really essential to have plasma with a tiling wm if it doesn't do anything but handle widgets, docks, the tray, and application launchers - none of which I actually use (except maybe the tray, but that can be replaced.)

What would be a sensible way to solve this? Anyone happen to know if this is an issue in dzen?