Tried out the latest garnome (which is fairly close to Gnome 2.4 I think). After fixing the wrong URLs and installing all the extra base dependencies, got it running.
A little better than the last time I tried. Screws up the desktop icons, the fonts and menus.
You still can't cycle through workspaces in metacity which makes it unusable for me. And gnome-terminal is still horribly flickery compared to konsole.
Oh well.