changing window managers

[Brian Craft <bcboy cisco com>]

I know this has been covered before, but none of the solutions I've seen
actually work.

How do you change the window manager for gnome? I've tried "killall metacity;
openbox &", and saving the session. But the session manager is unaware of
openbox, so it is never saved. Also the "killall metacity; openbox &" technique
suffers from a race condition with the default session config. About half the
time the session mananger restarts metacity before openbox. The metacity
properties have to be edited first to avoid this.

I also tried waimea, with the same result. Both of these are listed in the
gnome docs as compatible wms. 

I also tried adding them to the session start-up apps, but this wedges the
login. When it gets to openbox, or waimea, the start-up sequence hangs. In
fact, adding just about anything to the start-up sequence makes it hang. It
behaves a bit like it's failing to fork the program.

(the system here is a stock RH9 install)

b.c.