Hey guys, I'm going to get rid of gnome by dpkg -purging all four of the task-gnome-* debs that I installed.
I also stumbled on the fact that, for some reason, apt-get install mc also gets rid of them. unless one of you guys yells at me, this is probably the method that I will use, as I want some of the pre-gnome functionality of mc. What the heck is the big deal about gnome anyway? -- -t