change my home directory or how to migrate evolution?

[Pascal Bonesh <firms@tiscali.ch>]

Hi,

For some reason nautilus always changed to audio-viewer mode when I
opened my home directory. It then crashed and never could be brought up
again.

So I had to move to another user name and subsequently other home
directory. 

Now for almost every application this was painless: I just copied
the .dot file to the new home directory and they worked. So they just
look in ~/.whatever for their user-configs. This is how it should be
(IMHO).

The only troubles I ran into was openoffice, but changinge .sversionrc
was easy and now points to the new location. But why does it need to be
an absolute path in any case?

And then came evolution. I looked in '.gconf/apps/evolution' in
'.evolution' and I don't remember which other locations...

It didn't work and I found it still looked in the wrong/old locations. I
then tried to change these absolute paths in the config files to point
to the new location. But in the end nothing worked at all anymore. So I
ended up setting up yet another user with no .gnome* and .evolution
configs in it and starting all over again: setting up mail accounts
importing old mails by hand...

You can imagine that it was not a pleasant thing to do...

Now as I don't know what crashed the nautilus-audio-viewer and therefore
am not sure when it happens again I would like to be prepared for the
next time. 

I therefore have some questions:

1. how do I migrate a home directory best? I just created a new user and
copied almost all .* files from the old to the new folder and then did a
chown -R user:user * on my new home dir.

2. how can I migrate evolution? I would like to keep all configuration,
filters, junk mail detection, mail settings and mails. 

3. are there other programs with similar problems? How are their configs
moved?

Thank you,
Pascal