I mainly use suse and the missus uses ubuntu breezy. We've both become fed up with various things about ubuntu so it's now been dumped and at the moment the missus is using suse also.
The problem is she keeps complaing because I'm constantly changing themes and icons and layout of panels etc so she never knows where anything is.
All apps are set up to suit us both so rather than create a new user account for her and set it up from scratch, can I just clone the current user account so it keeps all the same app settings and group memberships etc but just give it a different name? then all that's needed is to set up the panel and themes to suit her.
I've never added a second user in linux so I have no idea what's involved.

in general yes, just use useradd to add her on, then, as root, copy all the files across. after than, use chown to make all the files in her new /home directory be owned by her, and not you any longer. pretty simple. some things mightnot work quite right, but you can easily delete app specific configs if need be.

Excellent, didn't realise it would be so easy, thanks. One thing before I try it, how would symlinks be handled? I imagine something linked to /home/me/whatever would still be linked to my user? I can't actually think of any such links but is there any command I can use that will display only symlinks in a given directory and it's subdirectories?

depends what kind of symlink it is. "blah -> /home/user/realblah" will point to the exactly same file, "blah -> ../realblah"would point to a relative file, is that what you mean? to find symlinks you can just use "find" or something, use the "-type l" option and you'll only see links.