best distro for xfce?

[moron]

Howdy folks.  Been having the life crushed out of me the last 24 hours trying 
to get a new machine setup with a suitable live + dev environment.

I am done with KDE (fuck you in the ass kmail2, Akonadi, Nepomuk) and Ubuntu 
Unity appears to only be suitable for the most base of nettop usage.  Gnome is 
pretty much in the same boat as KDE.

So that leaves xfce as the only realistic option.

Complicating things is that I need a decent email client that supports maildir 
format and I need to be able to run KDevelop.  I am also hoping to avoid as 
many hassles as possible doing things like playing MP3s or watching videos.  

I have tried setting up Fedora 17 with xfce but getting things like MP3 codecs 
installed is less than ideal and I have concerns over stability.  Has anyone 
here used Fedora for a period of time?  

I have tried Ubuntu 12.10 + xfc4 and had everything working great within xfce 
except after the first logout the desktop became totally messed up (workspaces 
missing, not able get focus on windows, unresponsive aps, etc.)  Unity also 
started acting unstable which is not cool with a brand spanking new install.   
Looks like I am going to have to do another install. . .

Has anyone here tried Xubuntu or another xfce focused distro?  How about Linux 
Mint?

Cheers

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