I initially had thought to do a clean install for 8.2 after having saved /home/ from 8.1; but now I'm not so sure and I'd like your input. Can I use the 8.1 /home/? and what would be the best way?
Absolutely. I carried my ~/ over many times - even between distro's. If /home is on it's own partition, just tell 8.2 to not format that parition when you install.
I ran into a problem in 8.1, with evolution when I upgraded it to 1.2 - due to dependency problems it took out some apps, particularly GnuCash. However, even after eliminating some apps the newer evolution severely intefered with the user desktop.
However, in this case you may have some issues in your ~/ causing these issues. You may have to remove a few directories in ~/ such as the ones that configure evolution and gnucash. You should still be able to get everything working. -- John LeMay KC2KTH Senior Enterprise Consultant NJMC | http://www.njmc.com | Phone 732-557-4848 Specializing in Microsoft and Unix based solutions