I just installed ratpoison wm, and its great. Ratpoison has this ugly blue background color, which I certainly didn't set, and I'm not sure how to get rid of it (is it somehow tied to gnome? because ratpoison doesn't have any desktop or is it tied to X). Also, how do I uninstall gnome, its just sucking up space on my drive, and I can't figure out how without removing all the components one by one (I want to keep some of the software that came with it, but not all). Any help welcome. Thanks.

the ratpoison background doesn't have anything to do with gnome... it's actually just the root window background. You can use programs like xsetroot, etc. to change it.

as far as uninstalling gnome... it depends on your distro. Although if your distro uses a package manager, uninstalling gnome could also uninstall a bunch of other programs (like you said)...

My humble advice is to back up your data/config, and do a reinstall, only installing the components you need. (Most distros have an "expert" or equivalent mode of installation, so just do that and install only the base system, and then go back in and install only what you will need.)

hope this was helpful.

-bj