Headaches setting in

[Jon Earle <earlej sympatico ca>]

Hi all...

X is just not easy to use.

I installed Gnome 1.0 the other day, on a new install of rh5.2, latest
patches and kernel, and am having troubles.  Hopefully you can help out.
Please be warned, I'm no X expert, so all this gtk, gdm, glib, gnome and
enlightenment stuff is whirling around my head like a think London fog.
<zathras>  Zathras not understanding.  Zathras good at usings, not
programmings.  </zathras>

Anyway,

1.  Gnome has a background setting.  So does enlightenment.  I set the
enlightenment background to use one of the enclosed pics 9they're really
nice!), and all was great.  Today, I was trying to resize a panel applet
(the battery power meter), and the panel crapped out on me, and I had to
kill X with ctl-alt-backspc.  When it came back up, no panel, and no
background.  After an hour or so of fiddling around, I got the panel back.
The background never made it back though, but the odd thing is, an
application window I had displayed from another machine was showing again!
It even worked for a few seconds until gnome or enlightenment crashed
again.   So, okay, I kill off the gnome and enlightenment dirs and files in
my home dir, and start over.  It comes up now.  I reset the background, and
a few things, and logout.  When I restart, the background shows breifly,
then disappears.  As well, the filemanager icon is no longer on my desktop.
 Okay, fire up fileman, icon is back.  Reset the background (via
enlightenment) and logout.  restart  and the same thing happens!  I killed
off the gnome and enlightenment dirs again,. and now, enlightenment has no
background pics to show!

2. I get lots of weird errors when I shut down gnome:  "sh: `-c' requires
an argument", "Gdk-ERROR **: an x io error occurred"  \n  "aborting...", etc

3.  If I kill the help-browser, I get a core file.

4. If I change _anything_ it is permanently hosed.  For example, I just
issued startx > output.txt 2>&1" to try and capture some of the errors I
get.  I killed that as it failed to load gnome (x sat there at the
crosshatch startup screen), and tried to restart gnome.  I get the message
fro menlightenment saying that it's starting, but that's all.  I now have
that lovely crosshatch screen, and a  dead gnome.  Time to kill the various
dirs again, and start over.  

How can I fix all this? Gnome is great, but it's driving me loopy!  I'm
seriously frustrated here!

Thanks!
Jon