Thanks Agust for your tip, but there was no issue with the iTaskNG. I had checked it already and had not found anything wrong with that part of the GUI.
In the on-going quest to find what was wrong with my installation, I started to notice a general slowdown of the GUI interface, especially when using Thunar file manager. That is something I had not noticed in previous unstable iterations of eLive. In itself it was telling me something immediately.
The light for the harddisk I/O was not blinking, so I had no idea why it was slow.
I used the basic tool of 'top' to find what if the CPU was busy, or something else entirely.
There were no processes that seemed busy, and Thunar was consuming about 2% of CPU only as the highest process on the list. I checked the wait time on the disk I/O and found that it was stuck between 50 to 70% all the time.
The disk I/O wait time being so high was strange. My work machine on unstable 1.9.56 does not seem to have the same type of issues when simply opening Thunar file manager.
I remembered that at work I created both '/boot' and '/' partitions with ReiserFS filesystem. However on the laptop I created the same partitions with 'Reiser4' filesystem type.
I decided to attach my 32GB USB pen drive which is Fat32 filesystem type. I open Thunar, attempt to access the disk, and the machine is once again slow trying to view the contents. Keep in mind that all I had in this drive was the installer module for eLive, which is 32KB in size maybe. Nothing else.
I kill the Thunar process and plug the USB drive to my unstable eLive work machine, and I found over 100 'fscheck*.rec' files that were added.
I did not go further. I simply put the eLive Topaz CD back in the CD-ROM, re-installed eLive and this time I went with EXT3 filesystem for the '/boot' partition, and ReiserFS filesystem for the '/' partition.
So I have eLive Topaz installed with that setting for about 4 days, and so far I have yet to experience any instability with the Enlightenment GUI, or slow down when accessing disk space with Thunar.
If I find anything else, I'll keep you posted.
- nelson