Well I'm glad to hear that things are 'back to normal' and I agree with others to change the repos to stable (just comment out the Testing ones, maybe even the MEPIS one as you don't really need the new changes and change the etch reop to read stable)

Another lesson is that gnome apps are more likely to break than kde ones. This happens far too often with gnome in Debian Testing for it to be just bad luck IMO.

Anyhow, good luck with antiX!

I'm just wondering about the default repos for the window manager (I've forgotten the name of that one) that antiX defaults to after the first boot up. Do the repos support that wm better than Gnome? If so it would not be that much of a big deal for us to move to that on at least one of the old laptops.

The default on antiX-M8 is icewm.

Window managers like icewm and fluxbox usually has no problems when using Testing repos, but some of the apps installed in antiX might, especially now that the Testing repo is going to get new stuff from Unstable such as xorg1.6 which *might* cause some initial problems. Some apps in Testing do break (until a fix is found), but not many and not often. However on 'mission-critical' boxes, you should really use the Stable repos only.

I think eriefisher's suggestion is good. ie use one box as a sort of"Test" box to see what is happening.