Surviving Mandrake 2 - Post-installation blues

I have a lot to bitch about: An OpenOffice bug keeps me from saving my files correctly. Firefox still not 1.0 in repositories. And from the comments in the forums, it won't be for sometime. I downloaded the latest version and it had me install itself within the user's directories structure. All the shortcuts would use to old version still but instead created one on the desktop and used that instead.