GNOME and BIOS problems

[Aaron Graham <aaron aarongraham com>]

Whenever I tweak a BIOS setting, GNOME reverts to some set of default
settings, and I can't change certain attributes in the Control Center.
For instance, I can't switch to certain Sawfish window manager themes,
such as Gleam and CoolClean (although I can switch to microGUI and
gtk), my panel pager applet suddenly switches back to 1 workspace, and
I can't save session settings.  This happens every time I tweak the
BIOS.

Yesterday everything spontaneously began to work again, but then I had
to change another bios setting this morning (I just got a new memory
module).

I have a TYAN Trinity 400 motherboard and Kingston 256MB mem module,
along with a 933 MHz pentium III, all designed for a 133 MHz memory
bus speed.

Any experts out there?
Thanks,
Aaron