Problems with frugal spup55-4G in Sony VAIO

[Bernard's Cask]

I'm using a frugal spup55-4G. I've found that upup's out-of-the-box xrandr breaks on some hardware and it's bothersome to have to resort to OLD-xrandr. I dont know exactly where these, my features/challenges, belong. I have a VAIO VGN-A290(UC) BIOS R0080F1 09/28/2004 with a nice 1920x1200 LCD, mostly failed keyboard (skips & sticks, I'm using Dell L100 USB kybd), Logitec M-BA47 4-button+scroll mouse (I'm not hung-up on the thumb button). ATI RV350 Mobility Radeon 9600 M10 video. I've been around since Slackware 0.9. I think I have an xorg problem; when I boot-up in PUPMODE=5 it seems to take just over 3 mins. and all seems great, except for any SFS mods; however when I boot-up in PUPMODE=12 it takes nearly 9 mins. and continues to run sluggishly and will somtimes freeze/crash when using interface. I'm having the same challenges with lhp503, but I don't think it's limited to puppy, as I believe my kano Hellfire does this as well.

Here's some of my GRUB boot paragraphs:

title Linux Puppy Slacko 5.5-4G run fs on fdisk
rootnoverify (hd0,1)
kernel /frugal/spup55/vmlinuz pmedia=atahd pdev1=sda2 psubdir=frugal/spup55 panic=5
initrd /frugal/spup55/initrd.gz

title Linux Slacko-Puppy 5.5-4G run fs fast in RAM
rootnoverify (hd0,1)
kernel /frugal/spup55/vmlinuz pmedia=atahd pdev1=sda2 psubdir=frugal/spup55 pfix=copy panic=5
initrd /frugal/spup55/initrd.gz

title Linux Slacko-Puppy 5.5-4G skip prior saves failsafe
rootnoverify (hd0,1)
kernel /frugal/spup55/vmlinuz pmedia=atahd pdev1=sda2 psubdir=frugal/spup55 pfix=ram,nocopy panic=5
initrd /frugal/spup55/initrd.gz

Also, It's been maddening trying to access window boxes when they run down off the display--I never knew about Alt-LeftClick movement and have always tweaked scripts--perhaps Linux would be more friendly if Wi-fi surveys, set-xftdpi & etc. would allude to Alt-LeftClick? I run my dpi at 168 and serif hinting on all of my fonts as it's much more relaxing on old-eyes. The icon grid step, both vertical and horizontal, require way too much much tweaking for friendliness. I'm trying to adjust the screen brightness, as at night it's disturbing to others in this studio loft I'm in. My PPM shows xbacklight-1.1.2 as being already installed, but terminal responds 'bash: xbacklight: command not found', it will not respond unless I (re-)install it. This command is not what i'm looking for, but is this a symptom of some more serious problem with PPM?