Frustrating install problems

["Richard A. Smith" <ras2 tant com>]

I am trying to install GNOME on my Debian system.  Well actually I seem to
have it installed it's just getting it to run that I am having problems
with.  

I installed the Helix distribution via apt-get on my (mostly) potato
system and the install seemed to go ok.  However after I log in via gdm
and X is started I am presented with the GNOME configuration mananger in
the upper left corner.  No Panels or  virtual desktops.  I am unable to
move the configuration manager and it does not have a boarder so I suspect
that the window manager is not running.

If I play with the configuration manager a bit then I get a window telling
me that the panel-background-capplet has crashed with a seg fault and that
I need to go see the "Application Crash Page"  Anybody want to tell me
where the App crash page is? I don't see anything listed on either the
main or the developers page.  Neither page has a search function. 
Searches at Yahoo and metacrawler don't yeild anything either.

Then thinking that perhaps my potato system wasn't quite current enought I
did an upgrade and my system is now up-to-date with the current frozen
release.  This however made no change for GNOME.

It's been really frustrating because I can't seem to find any basic
installation and configuration information on the GNOME system.  There's
lots of info on what to do and what to configure after it's up and running
but I can't seem to get that far.  Anyone got a tutorial on what GNOME
does during start up and how I can verify each piece?

I don't know if this matters but the system was a working KDE system
before I started with GNOME.
--
Richard A. Smith    ras2@tant.com 
"I'd hang out with science kids - they can blow things up!
 I mean , what's cooler than that?"
                                                   - Tori Amos