[PLUG] One GUI is too sticky, the other won't stay put

[George Langford <george@georgesbasement.com>]

For reasons having to do with legacy camera equipment and
other considerations, I'm running four PC's on my physical
desk - A SmoothWall hardware firewall, an unmentionable, and
two debians.  One debian PC was set up with considerable and
able help from a local linux consulting group; I'm setting
up the other one on my own, with some help from this group.
All four PC's share the same LCD monitor, mouse & keyboard
with varying degrees of success.  The SmoothWall is quite
happy to reveal its inner workings at VGA resolution; the
lesser alternative OS is happy at the maximum resolution of
the monitor, one debian PC is happy at a lesser resolution,
but running "dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86" (at root or
with sudo) lets me boost the resolution settings, but the
screen resolution window on the gnome desktop won't let me
change that.  On the other hand, rebooting always brings
the monitor to the same, less than optimum resolution.

On the other hand, the second debian PC lets me play all I
want with the gnome screen-resolution window, but when I
reboot that PC, it always reverts to VGA resolution.  It
does let me reset it once the GUI has started though.

All the while it's the same monitor ... but three different
graphics cards.

Another issue, this time having something to do with the
Belkin KVM switch that I'm using to keep track of all the
cables, is that I lose the mouse on switching from the
second debian PC to another PC and back again.  The mouse
works fine while plugged directly into the second debian
PC, and it works fine on the other non-firewall, lesser
alternative OS PC also.  Thank goodness for Alt+F8 to let
me restart that second pC after the mouse has frozen. If
only Belkin would respond to emails ...

They may all be inter-related.  I haven't a clue where to
start looking.

Is there another GUI configuration tool ?

An off-topic aside: I struggled for four months with Symantec
over ccAPP.exe's tendency to hog resources and run the hard
drive incessantly, and after about ten different "solutions"
they came up with the same idea as Grant's, and that worked -
remove every last instance of Symantec S/W, reinstall
LiveUpdate _first_, and then reinstall NAV with _no other
programs running_.  It has now run for half an hour or so
without starting that incessant little blinking red light.

George
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