Believe it or not, I "fixed" the problem (at least the background images menu not appearing). Previously, I had moved about half of the images out of /home/user/MyDocs/.images. Well, on a whim this morning, I moved the rest of the files out of that directory. And magically, the menu showed up. I moved some images into the .images directory, and it still worked. Thus I moved the images I wanted (both 3200x480 and a few multi-image plus .desktop files) into .images. Things are working now, and I am going to see if my widgets are more stable.

Up next, I want to set up syslog, install the powerusers kernel and overclock.

Thanks to all who responded.
--vr