I've just installed kde 2.2 on my machine. It is a fantastic piece of work - I think it's the most impressive thing I've yet seen on the platform. Things start faster, look better, do more... I had thought that it might be a bit tricky converting some windows users to the Linux desktop on the grounds of differences in look and feel. No longer a problem - you can make it look and feel the same, even to the extent of silly toys such as fading menus etc. Anyway - now to the interesting bit. Since startup times were faster, I installed it on the 32Mb machine just to see what happened. Two important things happened: 1. KDE now displays a pulsating icon on the pointer by way of an hourglass as an application starts up so the user is less likely to try and start the application again. 2. In spite of some serious disc thrashing, KWord starts in 10 seconds :) I'll do some investigation as to whether I can save any memory by discarding some unnecessary frills and toys, and report back with news of whether or not the machine is useable under KDE. I've just experimented with getting the startkde script to startup icewm (thanks for the suggestion Mike). I tried this yesterday with an older KDE with no effect, however today with KDE 2.2, I can get KWord to startup under icewm in 15 seconds - a factor of 3 speed improvement. Cheers -- Phil Driscoll