Making settings stick

I'm having trouble getting settings to stick. I'm not sure whether these are related problems or whether it's just my inexperience, but I'm trying to set up the fine points of a Suse10 install and numerous things just seem to keep getting lost:

* gKrellM, for monitoring CPU, sometimes finds it's settings at boot and sometimes doesn't. So sometimes I get a temp. display and sometimes I have to reconfigure the whole thing.

* Mountable FAT32 parbreastions listed in etc-fstab sometimes get mounted and sometimes don't.

* One day the main menu replaced KWrite with with Kate, for no apparent reason.

* The time is sometimes right and sometimes off. Then when I reboot to Windows, despite having set the time properly in Suse, it ends up being reset to GMT and I have to adjust Windows time.

Are these all probably unrelated? Or is there something I should know?

Also, is the boot log available somewhere? There seems to be a lot of useful debug info. shown during boot but it goes by too fast to read. I thought that the log of that might tell me something about things like why gKrellM is being flaky.