Well, I broke.. downloaded the ISOs when I'm supposed to be studying.. formatted, did a clean install. It's nice. Not huge huge changes, but still a nice new system. ALSA was a pain to reinstall though because of a change that's made in RedHat (it screws up the snd module). You have to do a couple more steps when compiling. Otherwise, not too bad.
Gnome 2.4 has little things here and there that are different. I couldn't name anything offhand though, I just notice them in odd times.
Here's a screenshot of my desktop. I've modified it with different themes/icon sets, so this is not what your system will look like fresh out of the box. You'll notice it looks a lot like Ximian Desktop 2's setup.. I liked their style/location of things, so I remade it in Gnome 2.4.