Control the display of portions of the interface

There are times when I want to see the data for a file without having to look at the downloaded content or wait for a video renderer to do its thing. It would be nice to be able to turn off the player section for those. Alternatively, it'd be nice to be able to turn off one or another of the panels (run with only the directory tree visible, or only show the status of downloading files, or even just display the already-existing slideshow function without having the rest of the panels visible.)

Other than that, how can you improve a program that works so well?