CentOS 5 :: Gnome-settings-daemon And SHMConfig ?

Setting up CentOS 5.5 on my laptop. After installing the synaptics driver, I am able to get a functioning X session without any problems (I'm using startx for testing). There are however two problems: 0/ mouse cursor is slow as snails and 1/ GNOME is fouled up.

- I've tried enabling SHMConfig in my xorg.conf file, and have also tried the HAL thing here. Either way synclient tells me to jump in a lack. I should be able to set suitable adjustments in xorg.conf, but running synclient -l to see what it's currently using would be much faster than hours of trial end error. As Google totally fails to provide anything helpful and I see nothing handy in documentation beyond the 1-line edit to xorg.conf I've already done, how in the universe do I actually enable SHMConfig to synclient's satisfaction? EDIT: scrolling doesn't work either, so access to synclient is even more important; on the upside I have manually tuned the mouse speed by T&E.

- GNOME was installed through the "GNOME Desktop Environment" and "GNOME Software Development" groups (yum groupinstall GNOME*) after net' installing CentOS. It has been startx'd through gnome-session. On startup I get a string of Windows: one is a dialog saying that there was an error starting the GNOME Settings Daemon with a last error message of "Failed to execute dbus-launch to autolaunch D-Bus session". The other two are dialog windows gripe about mail notification. Several icons are missing but gnome otherwise works fine, as long as I do nothing that requires SETTINGS. Searching the web and documentation hasn't helped here either, so how the flub do I fix that?

I expect to be using blackbox or something lighter most of the time, but as GNOME is the default.... it better be working!