Installing and running redhat gnome in parallel with cvs

For the past few months i've been running cvs exclusively on my machine. 
However, now that I'm going back to school I need something that is a little 
bit more dependable :p 

What I'd like to do is set up two users. One that uses Redhat gnome and one 
that uses a jhbuild installed cvs gnome. In the past I've run into problems 
with searchpaths etc. I was wondering what other people do to get this work. 
Do they hack their bashrc file to first check /opt/gnome2/bin before 
/usr/bin? 

Any suggestions would be appreciated. 

dave 

ps. Please cc me as I'm not on this list.