This may not be new, but I discovered it only from a couple of days.

If you put the windows taskbar on the top of your screen (see picture), while using Bryce the bar will work normally and you'll be able to switch between other applications, launch new ones, watch the clock ans so on.

Yes it's not usual to have the taskbar on top, but it works well. Your desktop will look more like that of a computer running Mac OS or Amiga OS, but it takes short time to get get used to it.

I've got bryce 5, but I guess it works well with earlier versions.