First, thanks meizirkki for your constant help to forum members, including myself. I agree with you here that full gnome is unusable but with some sacrifices and adjustments, gnome can be fast and very usable on the n800/n810.

I have installed gnome-core without all the extras . I did not install gdm or nm-applet so i use startx to start gnome . I also opted to replace nautilus with pcmanfm (much lighter/faster) for file management and desktop handling. Gnome takes less than 30 seconds to fully load for me which i find very reasonable for such a full featured DE.

Once loaded (less than 30 sec from startx), gnome is very responsive taking 2 sec to open the file manager and 5 sec to open midori.

Replacing nautilus with pcmanfm made a big difference since nautilus is very memory hungry. http://www.ubuntugeek.com/how-to-rep...in-ubuntu.html

For the issues with touchsceen/keyboard on n800/n810:
As mentioned by meizirkki, download the packages he mentions from the mer repo and downgrade to them. Then through synaptic, select those packages and lock their versions so they don't update automatically (Synaptic-->Package-->Lock). I have the touchscreen and keyboard working perfectly and their relevant packages held back when synaptic is marking upgrades.

I hope this can help people try gnome!