As far as I can tell, "No".  It seems there have to be images in there for it to work at all.  I think you could go 1 pixel wide on the sides, maybe 1 pixel high on the bottom too, but that still wouldn't get what you want (and be horrible to "grab" if you wanted).  Don't know how short you could go on the top caption, but you would want to squeeze the buttons in there.

If you could use maximized windows in your layout the width and bottom should do what you're wanting, but you'd still have a caption of some sort.

Maybe someone else knows a trick.