also, once you have got rid of GNOME, i urge you to try some other desktop environments, especially if you need the hard drive space. my recommendations are iceWM, which is similar to kde, but with less eyecandy and no desktop icons, or XFce, which is my favourite as it is incredibly simple to learn but very useful and customisable, or windowmaker, which is similar to XFce but with more features, although i find it clunkier to get my head around.
i also will try this uninstalling of GNOME as it seems too buggy. maybe it's my buggy hardware, i don't know (i mean i know my hardware has many bugs, but i don't know if that's the problem or not).