Lots of problems - help please

[Daniel Klein <bringa@gmx.at>]

Hi,

I'm having a whole damn lot of problems here, pretty much all of a sudden.

Ever since a good friend helped me install debian (let's say he's a 
little on the hectic side.. I didn't see everything he did), there was a 
problem with getting X to like my mouse (IntelliMouse Explorer).. I had 
to type startx twice to get X and KDE up and running, but then things 
were fine. Now everything's come crumbling down.

First of all, I had the alt-tab bug for some time (see my other mails in 
this list). That behaviour has stopped now. Alt-tab stopped working 
altogether, I get the taskbox and NOTHING ELSE. I can close it with ESC. 
Great. Next, my mouse has become sluggish like hell. We're talking maybe 
3 or 4 fps when I move the cursor around.

Also, I fail to remember what dpgk-reconfigure I have to run to do 
anything to my X Server. It is absolutely foggy to me, why X runs KDE 
(I've looked around the X config files and found no mention of KDE at 
all). I wanted to try fvwm, just to see if that'd run bearably fast 
(we're talking Athlon TB 1200 / 512 MB RAM / very fast 200 gigs hd / 
Geforce 3). I have absolutely no clue how to do that in debian.

I love apt-get for the easiness of installing things, but do any of you 
have any idea what a headache it is to find out what a certain package 
is called? If there was a simple 'list everything that's installed' (and 
I'm sure there is, I just can't find it) command, that would help 
already. There's xf86config, xf86cfg, dpkg-reconfigure 
whateverIhavetotype here and the settings in KDE. This is a damn 
headache, and I'd be infinitely grateful if someone could help me with this.

The alt-tab behaviour is totally unbearable right now. I want to solve 
this somehow, but I have no idea what to do. I know this is the linux 
mailinglist joker, but I'm seriously considering going back to Windows 
for good, and that'd be after 3 years of using Linux and trying my best 
to manage it. I had such high hopes for debian as well, it seemed perfect :/

Thanks for any help you can offer.

Daniel