Display managers basically give you a login screen and handle the Xserver startup / shutdown sequence. The K Display Manager (KDM) and Gnome Display Manager (GDM) are a couple of examples. XDM is another one that's been around for a very long time. You don't have to use a display manager and can start the Xserver without one. I personally use a simple .xinitrc file.

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I'm not sure why you would be having a "speed and responsiveness" issue, unless you are trying to run on very old hardware....I've never had a speed or responsiveness issue with any Linux on any hardware in recent memory...Linux is almost always better than the current versions of Windows, for example, on the same hardware, especially after it's been running for a while. I'v run KDE on a 900mhz laptop with only a gig of RAM and it was fine, at least to my eyes. I've run XFCE and Gnome on similar machines with 512 megs of RAM with no big issues. Installing multiple desktop environments is not going to slow down your system, you can only run one at a time, (as far as I know).

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My current experience: Installed Xubuntu 12.10 daily build. Configured it as best I could, but decided I didn't like it and wanted and LXDE desktop. So I fired up synaptic, installed all of the LXDE bits and pieces I normally install, then started uninstalling the XFCE components. Kept LightDM, and selected the openbox-LXDE session when logging in.

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I installed LXDE and made it my default desktop. Everything's normal, except in the menu there's an entry called "Other", and it's about 3 screens tall and contains about 130 applications, including ALL the GUI ones that are already in the other sub-menus, plus many command line apps.
The UI is a tad faster now, but still very noticable delays. I'm pretty sure by now that the hardware is to blame. Considering I bought it in 2006, maybe I ought to drop the notion that I can still get a decent experience on it, speedwise.
On the other hand, I am perfectly content with the speed and responsiveness of Lubuntu, as well as Win7 on my netbook(!). It has 1,2GHz pentium dual core U5400, whereas the one on my desktop is 3,8GHz AMD x64! The bottleneck might be the RAM, which is 2 GB of DDR1 on a cheap motherboard (doesn't support DDR2) in the old big brother, as opposed to 4GB of DDR3 in the netbook.

I came across this article a while after installing LXDE. It looks like this guy is doing what I wanted to do,
but I gotta say it's a whole lot more action to go through than just 1. install new desktop 2. set it as default.
Maybe the menu editor will help me clean things up in the menu.

A 2006 machine with 2GB RAM should not be slow, especially not with LXDE as desktop environment. There must be somethimg else that slows down your machine.

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