desktop problems

[Tom Roche]

As part of my .emacs overhaul, I moved/improved all my old
desktop.el-related code into a tlrDesktop.el (visible as

http://www4.ncsu.edu/~tlroche/tlrDesktop.el.txt

) and call from .emacs (after byte-compiling). In addition to being
faster, I've added code that allows me to have a separate desktop for
each platform on which I run. This is useful, because the various
platforms share one filesystem, AFS. This is necessary, because they
don't all name things the same way :-(

But I have run into two problems that annoy, and with which I'd
appreciate assistance:

* I'd like to have all my emacs-related files in ~/emacs, with only
  .emacs outside via

  /home/user> ln -s ./emacs/_emacs ./.emacs

  But I can't seem to put my desktop-configuration files (normally
  named .desktop) anywhere but ~. If I do 

  (setq desktop-dirname "~/emacs/")

  or

  (setq desktop-dirname "~/emacs")

  the desktop doesn't load, and C-h v desktop-dirname == nil. What am
  I doing wrong?

* Formerly my emacs started up in one frame with calendar in the lower
  window and the diary in the top window. Now I get the "top desktop
  file" (i.e. the last active buffer of the last session) in both the
upper
  and lower windows (though both diary and calendar load). How can I
  restore my previous behavior?

TIA, Tom_Roche@ncsu.edu