Gnome locking up.

["Harley D. Eades III" <hde@grics.net>]

Hello,
   This is my first post to the mailing list so nice to meet you. Any 
hoo I am having problems with gnome it seems to lock up when I change a 
setting. Like if I change the image in the background of the terminal 
then I press ok to apply my changes and boom it locks up any insight on 
this problem. Also I am running the latest stable version of debian and 
I recompiled the kernal to kernel-2.4.20 it compiled fine but every 
other boot the screen shrenks buy 3inchs or so on every side any ideas 
on what this might be. My laptop is a Dell 2650 Inspiron P4 1.8 256mb of 
ram 30gig HD cd-rw. Any help is gratly apreciated.

Thanks
hde