Hi Krister,
I am now running the latest version of Orca, (1990 from subversion) and i have encountered some strange behaviours with the combo box that selects person in the Orca preferences. ... Anyone else encountered this problem?
Yes. It's a known problem. See bug #404664. http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=404664 It's really a bug in gail that will hopefully be fixed in a new gail tarball release next Monday. If you are willing to build gail from SVN trunk/HEAD, then you can get to the fix now.