I am running Mandrake 9.0 using WindowMaker as my session. I have just today started having problems with it. It now takes about a min to open up any applications, especially evolution. I also am having a problem when I open up Nautilus as my file manager, for some reason when I use Nautilus it opens up in a KDE desktop with icons and all....NOMORE WindowMaker??? I think have to kill the file manager in order to get back to WindowMaker and I then have to setup all my settings again ie. themes, skins and so forth? Anyone else have had that problem? Be glad to hear from you if you did. Oh yea if you are interested here is a snapshot of my desktop.

http://www.infonetwerx.com/images/snapshot1.png

Well if i remember correctly you need to run nautilus with:
nautilus --no-desktop --sm-disable
command to diasable the desktop loading. Although it really defeats the purpose of using WindowMaker if you gonna load huge, slow, and annoying Nautilus.
If you have gtk+2 i suggest Evidence, otherwise mc, rox, or xftree, or even xfm are good. There is a thread about file managers somewhere in here, seach for it to see what the most popular file managers are.
Ohh BTW, even Konqueror is faster than Nautilus.
hth
-NSKL