Thanks for the info mzilikazi. I installed the cvs version on my test partition. It's definitely go better functionality than what you get through debian. Some things I was really missing, like being able to close windows by right-clicking on the taskbar entry and such are there. The file manager is much better too. My only gripe now...which is admittedly small, but still important to me...is the way you can't have both the panel and taskbar at the bottom of the screen. I'm not sure I can get used to having one on top and one on bottom.

The rox pinboard thing is great. I already had rox-filer installed, but I had no idea it could do that. I was wondering about being able to put desktop icons and such into xfce4 though. And some features of rox, like the way it mounts cd-roms automatically and such is very nice for the desktop. I'm having a problem getting xfce4 start up with the pinboard though. I changed the xinitrc file as you mentioned but that didn't do it. I now get just a black screen when it starts up. I can run "rox -p desktop" once I have xfce4 running...but I wish I could get it to start it up automatically. Any ideas on what might be wrong?