Dave

I seem to remember that back in the days of redhat 5.2, I had X and windowmaker going from startx to workable in approx 5 seconds (that includes the time that it took to resync the monitor and it was a P120 with a whole 24MB of ram). Now, it's still just as fast on everything I try to run it with.

Honestly, I don't see why you'd need to run something as bloated as gnome for the things that you want. I feel that desktop icons are mostly useless (well, that's just my opinion). All I have on my screen is a few wm dockapps and whatever program I'm running. Other than that, everything gets done with a few (quite a few) rxvt's.

Of course, having a window manager that can handle a large number of virtual desktops is good for quickly switching between tasks. Windowmaker accomplishes this well, and then uses alt+n for switching to whichever desktop you want. Nice, fast, easy to remember and requires less mouse usage.