Beta 2.8 downloaded and installed. Bugs encountered before:
I'm still getting "xd: out of memory" at the start of the boot. Doesn't seem to affect anything, but might be a bit alarming..
Selected HAL instead of Vl-hot. I'm still getting a "[failed]" message next to "Setting up hald", but, so far at least, HAL seems to be working - I've been able to mount both USB and optical devices without problems.
MC still doesn't understand .lzma packages. I'll install the Vector 5.8 version in a bit...
New problems:
the splash screen has a problem. In the final stage of the install, the blue background overlaps the bottom of the 'terminal' window. Also, during boot, messages continue below the terminal window.
During install, I tried to install the flgx drivers (new option), since the T40 has Radeon graphics. That came up with an error, allowed me to edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf with mcedit, but was still not happy. Went round in circles until I elected to remove the flgx driver and replace it with the radeon driver.
Otherwise, everything seems to be working well. More later if I hit any other oddities.
Oh, one other (really) minor item. During partition selection, I select a / partition, then go on to select /home (which is shared with two copies of Zenwalk). The installer offers 'keep" option (no format). That message appears twice, for some reason.

Nice to see Seamonkey 1.1.5 installed - I'd installed the 5.8 version a couple of days ago...
paul.