After a weekend of installing and re-installing, I
thought I would share what I have found:
Hardware setup:
AMD
Semperon
300+ (old)
64MB
AGP
graphics card
1GB DDR400 RAM
160GB HD
configured as follows.....
500MB boot partition
10GB swap partition
142GB root partition
250GB HD
configured at home partition
I have tried the following installs, in order:
Gnome desktop (64 and 32 bit) - desktop crashes at login
and will not work
Mate desktop (64 bit) - works fine
Cinnamon desktop (64 and 32 bit) - desktop crashes as soon as
I run an application
LXDE
desktop (32 and 64 bit) - works fine but some warnings flashed
when updating via YUM (something about unknown metadata)
I set up two user accounts, put some data in the home
folders and configured Thunderbird on both accounts (did
this on the Mate install). On subsequent installs, I mapped
the home partition to my data drive and it mapped straight to
the home directory structure previously set up - all the data
is there, as are the e-mail settings and browsing history. All
this without any further intervention.
Unfortunately, the current LXDE install won't let me create
any additional users for some reason (despite having set my
account up as administrator), so I can't yet confirm that my
second account will also map to the pre-existing home
folder for that user, but I have no reason to believe it
won't.
I'll have another play when the new memory arrives, I still
want to try Gnome and KDE, but I do like the look of
Cinnamon so far (despite not being able to get it to work
yet).
Many thanks to everyone who contributed their knowledge and
opinions.
Phil