xdm/Xserver/olwm problems

["r.l." <rl@ses.tas.gov.au>]

hello

I have a couple of seemingly intractable difficulties getting aspects of
the X windows system to work.

Firsty, I am using OLWM (yes I know its old and primitive but I like it)
and it works fine so far except for the 'save workspace' menu item. Error
is that it fails due to a lack of an owplaces command (and I can't find
anywhere to get this commnand from either). So after some research I
discovered that xtoolplaces can be used to do the same thing. It indeed
does create a file describing the condition of the workspace - calls it
.xtoolplaces. The problem is that upon a restart olwm takes no notice of
it. How can I make olwm read this file so as to restore the state of the
workspace to that which was saved?

Secondly I have xdm running and my remote win32 xclient interrogates it ok
and xdm puts up the xlogin widget. This works and appears to authenticate
the logon but after that no windows or welcome banner appears, just the
xlogin widget again. And so on. Am I missing something obvious in
/etc/X11/xdm/Xservers or /etc/X11/Xsession or something. The former has a
line :0 local /usr/bin/X11/X vt7 ... I have tried many variations of an
equivalent entry in terms of local or hostname, display number, etc but to
novail. 
I can't find anything in $HOME/.xsession-errors or /var/log/xdm.log that
helps.
I have set my DISPLAY variable in $HOME/.bash_profile too, but no good.

Any suggestions would be most appreciated.

Thanks

Rolf.