I'll open by saying this is not the FAQ. I'm pressing mod-shift-enter; that's not the problem. I installed Ubuntu 10.10 under VirtualBox, using all defaults. Then I did apt-get install xmonad, which pulled in xmonad 0.9.1. At this point I tried a few approaches to switch to xmonad, based on http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/index.php?title=Xmonad/Using_xmonad_in_Gnome For the simplest approach, I killed metacity then ran xmonad. Upon running xmonad, all my windows disappeared. I pressed mod-shift-enter a few times; no terminals appeared. I killed xmonad and started metacity again. The original windows reappeared along with the terminal windows I created while xmonad was running. They were in a layout that could only have been created by xmonad. So it's clearly doing something, but I can't see what while it's running. /usr/share/applications/xmonad.desktop and /usr/share/xsessions/xmonad.desktop both exist. I've tried the various gconftool commands on the above page, admittedly in a somewhat cargo-cult manner. When I feel like I've strayed too much from the pristine config, I recreate the user settings. Any ideas on fixing this? -- Brian