You're right in that the install is not really a lot more lean, but with a hd install you get debian which can be stripped down to bare essentials much more easily than Mandrake. As I said before, I find the Mandrake dependancy lists hellish to work with and that counts for both installing and uninstalling. Sure, I could just use --nodeps but that's just forcing it to do what I want. I'd rather try and get a system that doesn't argue with me so much!
Oh, and many thanks for my first T, cooker!