well that's why using a distribution is easier than doing things by yourself :-) you can for sure create your own desktop by plugging several programs togather, but then you need to know about certain things. We could detect that X settings are missing, but after all, all applications could, and all applications will look ugly without them. Openbox is a Window-manager, like Compiz or Metacity, so it's not its job to define the X settings. Your distribution should have set 'gnome-settings-daemon' as auto-start on logging (I wonder why it was not the case for you). In any case, I think that when you start tweaking your desktop like that, you need to learn a bit (what you did), and that's part of the fun :-) 2013/9/18 Jehan