<big snippage>
Just to add my two penneth...
Management Summary - TDE Chaps: Please carry on as you are.
We tried KDE4 and the latest Gnome and for us (lots of users on X Terminals with a central server) they were completely unusable as they demand 3D graphics acceleration and other resource that just isn't there or works horribly over a network. The world seems to have gone mad on the 'need' for eye candy and lost sight of the fact that a desktop is not an end in its own right.
For us, a mouse is mainly a device with which you indicate which xterm you want to type at :-)
TDE works superbly for us and long may it continue to do so. Many thanks to all involved.