[lug] Messed up configurations, X, Gdm, KDE?

[Thomas R. Detman]

Help! About a year ago I bought and installed Accelerated-X display
server version 6 <http://www.xig.com> because I could not get XFree86 
version 4.0 to do "overlay" mode. I have a "truecolor" system, and 
overlay mode allows an application to open a window with a different
"visual", "pseudo-color 8" on the desktop. I needed that to have control 
of colors for a specific application, IDL, <http://www.rsinc.com>
Everything was fine for many months, until...
I got a new hard disk, and intending to use to the original disk as a
convenient back up, I did a fresh install of RH7.2 on the new disk, 
leaving RH7.1 intact on the old disk. 
The Red Hat 7.2 install included XFree86 4.1.
So, I tried again to make it do the overlay mode, and it did, but not
quite right. It made "pseudo-color 8" the default visual, instead of
"true-color 24". That's based on output from xdpyinfo. So, I installed
the Accelerated-X again. It also seems to make "pseudo-color 8" the 
default visual, meanwhile higher level things are breaking. I've been
using mostly the Gnome Desktop, but KDE is comming on strong, so I'm
checking it out, looking at the trade-offs. Then I start having problems
with both Gnome and KDE. To be "safe", I log out and log back in order
to switch. First, under Gnome I can't add a DeskGuide applet to the panel;
attempting to do so produced the following (in ~/.xsession-errors):

Gdk-ERROR **: BadMatch (invalid parameter attributes)
  serial 606 error_code 8 request_code 128 minor_code 3

It gets worse, now the help icon on the panel won't work either;
the help window tries to open, but it's just a brief flash,
~/.xsession-errors gets this:

Message: Successfully registered
`OAFIID:nautilus_factory:bd1e1862-92d7-4391-963e-37583f0daef3'
Message: Successfully registered `OAFIID:Bonobo_Moniker_std_Factory'

Gdk-WARNING **: GdkWindow 0xcc00091 unexpectedly destroyed
Gdk-ERROR **: BadMatch (invalid parameter attributes)
  serial 1777 error_code 8 request_code 128 minor_code 3
Gdk-ERROR **: BadMatch (invalid parameter attributes)
  serial 1778 error_code 8 request_code 128 minor_code 3

Then I logged out and logged back in under KDE, and now it's control
panel is totally missing. Fortunately, the mouse buttonts still brought
up menus.

This stuff is a nightmare, for me anyway. I haven't even described 
all the wierdness. I even tried re-booting.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
I'm running Red Hat 7.2: 2.4.9-31smp #1 SMP on an i686,
running the Sawfish window manager, (ran up2date yesterday);
don't even know what else is relevant, where to look or who to ask.