Thanks to those folk who responded. Much appreciated I was beginning to get paranoid ... :-)
Conky is one issue and a rather minor one at that and rates as an annoyance. It may just be that Gnome and Conky don't play nicely together, because trying it out on Fluxbox, Xfce4 and even KDE all is fine. Gnome however, well that is something I will continue to hack away at. Thanks for all of the links provided Bob. That was for Conky and to be fair, I should have said that I have been reasonably successful in getting it to work as a consequence of Googling, however, as already stated, with Gnome things are not well. The other issues remain however, and those are the one's I have difficulty Googling for. If it is true that these have already been reported as a bug, then I'll wait for these to be fixed upstream. Anyway, thanks for the comments/ input. AG
