newbie user problems with panel and gmc

["J. Maynard Gelinas" <maynard jmg com>]

   Hi folks,
   I'm a newbie user of gnome (have been using it on and off since 1.0;
currently I've got 1.0.3 installed from RPMs on an RH5.2 system.  The box
is a Dual PPRO200 with kernel 2.2.1/glibc-2.0.7 and the basic 2.2 upgrade
kit.  I'll note that I _don't_ have any problems with stock X and fvwm95, 
WindowMaker, and KDE on this machine. 

   Recently I've switched to gnome full time for a while to test it out and
have been seeing some interesting problems:

o) The panel often crashes while in use.  Sometimes it crashes and leaves
in a state which when the panel restarts it thinks another panel is still
in operation.  A ps shows that the original process is gone.  The
interesting thing here is that sometimes the panel will get into a state
where it _can't_ be restarted without wiping out ~/.gnome/panel*.  Often
when it crashes it doesn't come back with the applets I've selected 
either. I have to completely reconfigure it by hand... most annoying.

o) gmc has twice _completely_ crashed my system from userspace.  Since gmc
is threaded I think gmc is actually tickling either a glibc or kernel bug
in its thread implementation.  When this happens, not only do I lose my
console, but the system refuses to spawn new processes.  This prevents me
from logging in over my net and safely shutting the system down.
Interesting thing also: gmc often just crashes outright leaving a core dump
on my desktop (love that yellow bomb :-) ), but often when I try to delete
the core dump by right clicking and selecting delete it just crashes gmc
again leaving me with another bomb.  Hell, just _breathing_ on gmc seems to
cause application crashes.  

   Even so, I'm quite impressed with gnome.  I'm especially pleased about
the GUILE/GTK binding availble.  Talk about a cool GUI whip it up and
prototype it scripting language... _much_ nicer than TCL/TK.  :-) 

Looking forward to suggestions, 
J. Maynard Gelinas