What do you mean, "You installed Sawfish". Do you mean you installed the package and restarted the computer? Try typing in gconf-editor and going to desktop > gnome > applicationswindow_manager and editing the 'default' entry to say/usr/bin/sawfish. The one above that should say current and should be unwritable.
Well, I was totally confused, now I'm just somewhat confused :)The most serious problem I think I have is that gnome's config is hosed. It takes about a minute to launch instead of the usual 10 seconds.
Second, I appear to have no window manager and installing sawfish seems to fail.
Shall I just apt-get remove gnome and then apt-get install it again? Or does that way madness lie? :O Adam