I think that the sidebar is really confusing. When you click on an icon, it launches the app. You click on it again, and it brings that app to the top. There's no obvious way to start another instance (you have to right-click). If there are multiple instances of an app open, you have to go through two steps to choose it: first click on the icon, then on the instance you want. Why combine the unrelated concepts of launching a process and window management?

Second, the way the menubar...

Here I will show you how to enable the Compose key in X. It lets you type unusual characters like this:

Çøµþö§ə kæÿ

by pressing the Compose key followed by a predefined sequence of keys. Here are some good references:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key
http://www.hermit.org/Linux/ComposeKeys.html

Anyway, first you need to choose which key you want to be the Compose key. Then, open a terminal and enter the command "xev"...

When you plug in a removable storage device in your Arch box and get an error dialog with some kind of errors about HAL when you try mounting it with your favorite file manager, this should fix your problems:

First, edit "/etc/dbus-1/system.d/hal.conf".

You can obviously use whatever your favorite editor is in place of vim.

Now find something that looks like this in the file:

...