So, it's been a few weeks since my change over from LMDE Gnome to LMDE Xfce. I have to say overall I am still very happy with Xfce. Of the things I have mentioned before, here is an update for a couple of them.
I was having problems with Google Chrome opening up properly. There seemed to be others with this problem as it was showing up on the Linux Mint forums. Even though Chrome has not been updated, one of the other recent updates seems to have cleaned up this problem. Chrome is now opening up every time without a problem.
During the time I was having problems with Chrome, I was playing around with Firefox. For me, I wasn't really happy with previous versions of Firefox. The 5.0 version was actually pretty nice. Since I mainly use my Acer Aspire One (now that my Dell 6000 is having issues with its wireless card) I have nothing showing other than tabs and the address bar. Chrome has had the ability to remove the title bar for a while and I was finally able to find a plugin for Firefox that removed it also. I think the one thing I like Firefox over Chrome is the ability fo Firefox to clear out the cache when closing it.
I ended my experiment with upgrading Thunderbird. It was freezing up after running for a while and then would just shut itself down. If I happened to be running Firefox at the same time, Firefox would also freeze up and then shut down. Oh well, I tried.