As I've said before (and will say again) it was not a typo. At the time, pretty much anything was setup to direct to stage.maemo.org (the maemo staging repository), up to and including nokiacangodieinariver.maemo.org.

That info is 4 months out of date and no longer relevant. You want repository.maemo.org.

Desktop crashes can be caused by a variety of things. Generally it's third party applets (desktop, statusbar, or taskbar) crashing that bring down the Desktop, but there are a few other cases unrelated to this that can cause it (most notably waking a Bluetooth keyboard from sleep, which causes it about 10% of the time). To prevent crashing loops, the Desktop restarts with everything reset to default.

I filled bug #2614 on the issue, but got shot down. I'm still of the opinion that this behavior is broken and incredibly burdensome on the user (especially considering how unstable the Desktop really is in realworld usage). If they can't manage to make it just a little stable (c'mon, Bluetooth keyboards causing crashes ), then they really need to give us a faster recovery mechanism (I'm a fan of a "Restore my settings..." menu option after a crash).