@twitter: maybe I’ll try GNOME 3 this week. I wonder how that may affect KDE-GNOME cross-compatibility.

What you are doing should work well. Gnome Panel still acts like a nice X11 application. You can also stick a full blown Gnome session in a single virtual desktop if you like, by starting nautilus and then using your other window manager’s menus to “unstick” the desktop background. It may also take a geometry argument, so that it is not the same size as your other desktops but I have not played with that. Gnome Panel is a little hard headed about placement, but you can easily run it in other window managers. It’s the KDE plasmoids that are now stumping me. It seems like an all or nothing proposition was required to achieve smooth scaling but parts of applications achieve this outside of the a full blown KDE session, so there’s hope that I might figure things out.

Some of the stability problems may be my own. A rebuild when Squeze goes stable will probably fix most of my bugs on my upgraded 64 bit Lenny box. Several fresh 32 bit installs had almost no issues. In fact, I’m very pleased with a netbook install of Squeeze.