fatmac wrote:

except the wallpaper selector won't open

I've found that if the set wallpaper isn't where it was when set, it throws a wobbly.

Bingo, fatmac. I didn't start the new thread I threatened above, because when I ran wallpaper.py from a terminal, the error messages led me to discovering that I hadn't recreated a link folder in user/share/wallpaper, to the folder where I store images I've downloaded for wallpapers. Fixed that up, and wallpaper is fine. I'm pretty sure I've fixed the fstab conflict with a UUID for the CDROM (as far as I can determine, that should be a property of the disk in the drive, rather than of the drive itself, and shouldn't appear as a UUID in fstab), so now it's just a matter of getting my sound back. I'm going back through my sound threads now (many modprobe commands and a little tweak that was required to get USB sound working, which seems to have spontaneously caused the system to recognize the OPL3 compatible component in the NeoMagic sound hardware).