As for the freezing issue, I know that it was an issue with the graphire as well but that you could work around it by going in and editing some of the Gimp files. The other option for the graphire was that you go back to an older driver - which is what I ended up doing. That's probably not an option for the Bamboo. As a result I'd guess that there will certainly be a workaround by now for the Bamboo with Gimp. How painful it is, I don't know.