Established that Gnome is built with the Gtk toolkit whereas KDE uses Qt.
I now know therefore that I require GtkGuitune and not QtGuitune if I’m going to wean myself off KDE - which I plan to do.

Real installation showstopper was forgetting to disable ACPI in the BIOS. As a result the installation would crash and burn in apparently random places and I only twigged on about the fifth abortive install. The biggest annoyance with a crash like this is that there’s absolutely no information to be had from the machine as to what’s occurred as the hardware has simply shut the machine down to all intents and purposes. Sometimes I’d be left with an inactive screen, keyboard and mouse and others the screen would die - both outcomes needing a hardware reset to clear.

The addition of
append="acpi=force"
to my lilo.conf will allow me to turn acpi back on in the bios for seamless auto-power-off like you’d expect. This has to be forced on my machine as the BIOS is pre-2000.

Added urpm sources:
urpmi.addmedia NORLUG-10.1 http://mirror.datapipe.net/norlug/mandrake-10.1/RPMS/ with hdlist.cz
urpmi.addmedia eslrahc http://www.eslrahc.com/10.1/ with hdlist.c z
urpmi.addmedia plf-free ftp://plf.time4t.net/pub/plf/mandrake/free/10.1 with hdlist.cz
urpmi.addmedia plf-nonfree ftp://plf.time4t.net/pub/plf/mandrake/non-free/10.1 with hdlist.cz
urpmi.addmedia --update updates http://www.sunsite.org.uk/package/mandrakelinux/official/updates/10.1/main_updates with media_info/hdlist.cz
urpmi.addmedia main http://www.sunsite.org.uk/package/mandrakelinux/official/10.1/i586/media/main with media_info/hdlist.cz
urpmi.addmedia contrib ftp://ftp.sunsite.org.uk/package/mandrakelinux/official/10.1/i586/media/contrib with media_info/hdlist.cz

Get them from norlug.org, eslrahc.com and easyurpmi.zarb.org

Installed so far:

• Skype