I did a hard drive install of DSL and I'm loving it. However, I have one somewhat glaring problem.
That is, I have a script residing on another machine that opens xterm in a manner like this

#!/bin/bash
xterm -e "command and options" &
xterm -e "command and options" &
xterm -e "command and options" &

This was not a problem using Knoppix either from the CD or as a hard drive install. It pops open an xterm window and then backgrounds it and opens another and so on. So, I'm wondering why DSL can't pull it off. With DSL, the xterms pop up and then disappear. Does it have something to do with DSL's windows management? Can I upgrade it through synaptic or a DSL package?

My guess is that the commands aren't being found - when you start xterm like that it will exit when the program does.

For example - this will print "Hello" and then exit immediately so you will barely see it:
xterm -e "echo Hello" &

However you can add a 5 second pause with:
xterm -e "echo Hello;sleep 5" &

If you are getting a "Command not found" type error then you will best see it with:
xterm -e "eco Hello;sleep 5" &

In short - try adding ";sleep 5" after your command to see if you get more info

Nice tips.
I did something similar by just running the commands line by line in an Xterm shell with different variations.
With the man pages and some Googling, I came up with this solution.
Instead of using Xterm, I used RXVT and then for whatever reason I had to drop the quotes. I guess it's just a usage issue besteen Xterm and RXVT.
So I switched it to something like this without quotes:

#!/bin/bash
rxvt -e command and args &
rxvt -e command and args &
rxvt -e command and args &

Thanks for the tip though. That was a good idea.