Finally have a stable system back so I can get on here and hopefully find out what caused my recent nightmare? There are questions in here! I boot into init3 (v8.2) and load kde from 'startx' command. Yesterday, I went into gnome to set some fonts and styles/themes so that my gnome apps looked a bit better in kde (and I guess check it out a bit). I know the control centre runs from within kde, but here it crashes a lot doing that. Anyway, on next loading kde, it loads fine but then!!!!!!!!!, not one but a continuous stream of gnome desktops with nautilus file manager trying to load. An error box popped up (about icon view fault) and it just kept respawning at a rate of knots. It hogged the keyboard so I could not even Ctl-Alt-F2 or Ctl-Alt-Bkspce to find a way out. I could find no other way out after 10 minutes and dozens of these desktops popping up and falling over so I took the punt and powered off. I know under 8.1 you had to go into Nautilus setup and turn off a setting about drawing the desktop. I have no idea where that setting has gone, I certainly could not find anything like it. Even so, the old problem just drew the nautilus desktop (ie gnome icons) once. This was a rampaging runaway process of rapid fire file manager windows on top of the gnome desktop but still showing the kde panel (not working though). The other change I got caught out by was that you have to set a new variation on the kde 'save session' setting becuse the default appears to be to save the session and of course that meant the damn problem gets saved. I figured that out I think, you change the setting to restore a maually saved session only and then you get the 'save session' option near the logout menu item. On reboot, at init 3, I logged in and killed all directories dealing with kde, gnome, nautilus, metacity as well as .kderc; started X and have a standard kde desktop with problem gone. Luckily I don't tweak too much so a quick session in kde control centre and I'm travelling ok again. Sorry to just rave on! Can anyone give me a clue as to what happened here to cause this nightmare. At the moment I have simply sworn never to enter gnome again :-) And can anyone tell me where the Naultilus setting has gone? Could I have just killed the kde 'saved session'? Was there any other way to solve this - bearing in mind my hard disk was thrashing away and my keyboard and mouse were almost totally non-responsive? IMHO, whilst it is nice to have desktop choice in Linux, it really would be nice if they played together a little better. I'll stay with kde for now and maybe read up on Windowmaker or Fluxbox I think! Paul.