Yes, you can ditch it. BTW, it seems to me, that you're using outdated lenny/squeeze mix version. Currently, there are few stable version of ED fully dist-upgrade'd to Squeeze available (including barebone ones, where you would rather add things that interest you, instead of removing), and even experimental wheezy builds (with major problems inside, yet to be resolved).

Considering that you're willing to spend some work customizing, you may re-think basing it on already available Squeeze image. Or go though pain of dist upgrading yourself, as after that, half of your configs will get overwritten, or messed/unusable, if you decide to keep them in original form.

There shouldn't be any problems with it - except fact, that some programs (iceweasel, chromium), doesn't ever show right-click menu, when fullscreen, if runf rom within maemo (debbie and friends). To get them work properly with fullscreen, you need to run them from LXDE.

Once, I had habit of running resource-intensive things from Maemo itself, avoiding LXDE as middle-man, to save resources. Hoever, in practice _ much to my surprise - everything works exactly as fast (or as slow) in LXDE, if not faster. I have no idea why, maybe it have something to do with Xephyr optimizations, or whatsnot.

You don't need any of them, as it's chroot, so Maemo provides access. Hoever, there is a sad twist in debian packaging - if you remove network manager, apt-get will force you to install wicd, if you remove wicd afterwards, it will force you to install network manager. Then, you will have *both* wicd and network manager working, due to some bug in wicd de-installation (so it won't be installed for apt, but will be still present and working on system).

Only one way to get rid of them is manually delete files, or create fake network-manager (& friends) packages, containing nothing (dummies), that will replace real ones

Hope it save you some nn hours of getting hit by that bugs yourself and another couple of debugging, why the hell such bizzare things happne, and how to fix it

/Estel