Fresh install of T3 (observations)

I decided I'd do the fresh install of T3,  I've had so
many symptoms during this experience, that I'm going to
put them all into one email, rather than to break them
out in the hope that someone can make sense of them.

Also I apologize in advance for not writting down all
the error messages along the way.

My environment:  A Centrino based 'white box' laptop.

1/ Tried installing Core 2 test 3 from CDs... during install
   I selected 'custom' install, and you get the python
   core dump (discussed during yesterdays email exchange).

2/ Changed install choices to 'Workstation', and then later
   said 'install everything'.  That seemed to work.

3/ I use KDE so I tried using the desktop switcher tool
   from the menu.  It never came up.  I then run 'switchdesk'
   from the command line, and find a traceback:

   File "/usr/share/switchdesk/switchdesk-gui.py", line 36, in ?
     from backend import *
   File "/usr/share/switchdesk/backend.py", line 18
     PROGNAME = @NAME@
                ^
   SyntaxError: invalid syntax


   So I found 'switchdesk-helper' and ran it as
   'switchdesk-helper KDE'  and that worked.

4/ The task bar RHN applet indicated that new RPMs existed.
   Clicking on it, running up2date I fetched the new version
   of up2date and installed it.

5/ Running up2date again, I installed the remainder of the RPMs
   NOTE: Each RPM had a GPG error!

6/ I tried running TuxRacer.  it wouldn't start, and complained
   about "SDL..."  (sorry, I didn't write it down).

6/ I like to use xine, so I fetched apt-get from freshrpms
   and installed it.  Then I ran apt-get install xine.
   It complained about two different versions of a 'policy'
   file on the system and suggested a command to execute.
   Doing that it complained about something else, and suggested
   something else.  After 3 rounds of that, I was able to install
   xine, and it worked.

7/ I tried TuxRacer again.  This time it worked fine.  I'm puzzled.

8/ I'd sware that after I ran Kmix (under test2) that it left a
   volume control applet on the task bar.  Now I can't figure out
   how to get the volume control applet _onto_ the task bar!

9/ This morning, the update icon indicated that 22 updates exist.
   The alert box lists them all.  But after running up2date,
   it says my system 'was already up to date', ... but there are
   still 22 new RPMs.

10/  Running 'yum update' basically worked, but it complained about
     perl-XML-Twig, so doing 'yum --exclude perl-XML-Twig update'
     gets past that error, and installed the rest.

11/ The update icon still says there are two RPMs outstanding:
    perl-XML-Twig, and perl-Net-DNS, but up2date still insists
    that my system is up to date.

12/ What happened to kernel 322?  I was running that on test 2,
    but test 3 didn't ask for it to be downloaded.

13/ My system still doesn't detect hot-plugged USB devices.
    (Cold plugging is still OK).

Overall, the experience is poor, and discouraging (for a final
beta test).