Saving Sessions; Desktop guide (pager)

[John Mellor <John Kungfu-tse net>]

As a newcomer to Linux I like the Gnome environment very much - it is so
elegant, tidy and intuitive after the muddle of Windows.  However, in
both Mandrake 8.0 and 8.1 I have found many niggling problems that spoil
it greatly, and I would very much like to know if they are a product of
me, my machine, Mandrake or Gnome, and whether they can be put right.

	The first is that I have never been able to accurately save a session
on logging out. What reappears and in what virtual desktop seems to be
almost a lottery, and I cannot discern any pattern. In particular,
Evolution nearly always reappears in desktop 0 after being saved in
desktop 1, and Nautilus never reappears. The latter shows in the
'Programs currently running' as Trash with an order of 40, as opposed to
50 for Galeon, evolution etc. If I change it to 50 and normal it still
does not reappear on logging in, and I find it has reverted to 40, Trash
when I next run it. Abiword does not register in the Session list at
all. Galeon cannot maintain its offline state and tells me that none of
my tabbed sites can be accessed when it loads up on logging in.

2	I cannot get the tooltip names for my virtual desktops to show in
spite of clearly setting them to do so in the deskguide properties. 

3	I cannot get the long list of panels to hide from view in the list of
windows shown when clicking the deskguide arrow, in spite of unchecking
them in the properties dialog.

Are there any solutions to these problems?