As there's a brand new release out and I have recently acquired a spare laptop and harddrive I decided to try installing Debian once again. The new installer really is a big improvement, the only downside was that I was planning to run KDE and the 'Desktop Install' option puts in Gnome by default - I was assuming I would get asked for my preference, trying to remove Gnome afterwards proved to be too difficult for me, so I've ended up with both installed. Still, this was the first time I managed to install Debian and immediately boot into a graphical environment, no manual configuration of X, so progress is definitely being made!