Version considerations

Dear slackfolk,

I am sorry if this is a bit vague, but -
I have used Slackware as my main OS since 10.0. With 13.37, it
introduced a kernel with which suspend stopped working on my Thinkpad
T40P (or rather, resume stopped working, but you know). It died and I
got an X32 which does the same. The most recent Slackware will not
suspend correctly, and this goes for every current Linux distribution on
that laptop. I have seen some pointers to working around that problem,
but I have found nothing that seems to solve it.
Lately, I have been using Fedora 16 with Lxde. It is practical in so
many ways, but sometimes, removing something I installed will blow away
a standard library, so the automagical functions will cripple my
system. Since not experiencing that kind of breakage is a major argument
for running Slackware, I confess I am feeling homesick.
Now, if I was to roll back in the versions, I would expect to run into
some conflicts. This machine is my all-round computer, and I use:
* LibreOffice
* Abiword
* Focuswriter
* Claws Mail
* Inkscape
* Filezilla
* Medit
* Transmission
* Xfce or Lxde
* LyX
* poEdit
* Umplayer
* Scribus
* Newsbeuter
All these except Xfce I have installed as the most recent versions
using Slackbuilds, which is a luxury it is very easy to become
accustomed to.
Of course, I could go for adapting the latest 13.37 builds - most would
build just fine, I would guess, but I would also expect some things to
suffer version problems - GTK and QT stuff, for instance, but maybe I
could upgrade those separately.

Please, your thoughts?

Yours,
Morten