Software :: Getting Recommendations For Application Alternatives?

I am searching for recommendations for some applications I am currently using and would like to know what the members of this community are thinking:

1-Gwenview: prior to version that came with KDE4.5.1, Gwenview used to be very fast and easy on the system resources. I am not quite sure if it is because I am using XFCE or just because Gwenview got bloated like KDE, but it is very frustrating to have to restart Gwenview after 10 minutes of work or so because it became too slow to respond and constantly lag behind... After a few file operations, it gets so slow that copying a picture of 1MB solewhere else on my HDD takes more than 5 sec. It just becomes sluggish. Anybody know an alternative to Gwenview that would have the same look and feel and the same basic features ?

2-Okular: Really dont know what happened and I tried to reinstall it several times, but it simply no longer runs.. If I launch Okular it will open, but if I open a PDF file by double clicking on it, it will launch Okular and it will immediately crash. In konsole I see:

Code:

okular: relocation error: /usr/lib/kde4/okularGenerator_poppler.so: symbol gzopen64, version ZLIB_1.2.3.3 not defined in file libz.so.1 with link time reference

I really tried to google this and to reinstall the poppler libraries, no success. For now I am stuck with XPDF and feel I am back in 1974 with pre-commodore technology.

3-Not a big deal, but I am using Thunar as my file browser and really miss Dolphin's features such as shortcuts (places) and general look and feel. I do however prefer thunar's speed. Anybody knows of a good file browser and if not, how to add shortcuts to thunar like in Dolphin?