I spent some time to get things upgraded and life has improved.
I upgraded to RedHat 7.2, which gave me improved versions of Mozilla, Koffice and Kde, which have fixed most of my problems. I’ve also moved over to Mozilla for both Mail and Web, which is tighter. I can now open Excel docs in kspread, and copy and paste between all apps.
The LDAP problem is better, in that it is now looking for names, but lastname first, which is not my preferred method. I still havent looked into mounting netware volumes. Other problems include not being able to print.
I’m barely using the VMWare app at all.