http://www.newtolinux.org.uk/forum/index.php?board=14;action=display;threadid=204FoX, you might find the link above interesting if you plan to run XFce and DFM together as a desktop environment, which is what i now will be doing.
for the record, i have slack 9 on a celery 700 and while kde 3.1 seems to run fairly okay on it, i have not had any noticable slowdown whatsoever with xfce and would recommend it to anybody.
edit: and as for your office woes, do try out siag office but as for abiword, which version do you have installed? you may want to uninstall it and if you are going to use slack 9, use the slackpack that comes on cd1 with it. or better, compile abiword from source, which will ensure you have all the correct libraries and everything before you install. either way, i am thinking it will possibly be something to do with your 7 to 8 upgrade and the different libraries in each version of slack (just a guess)
another edit:
http://www.koffice.org/install-source.phtmlit looks as though you can quite easily install KOffice on a system with no KDE installed too, which you might want to try sometime.
[ April 16, 2003: Message edited by: Calum: crusader for peace & freedom ]