Well, most of the things I bitched about 4.0 have been fixed in 4.2. All in all, a much better user experience, except that things are not very zippy.
BTW, owing to MEPIS not shipping 4.2 yet, I have switched to Debian Lenny. It needed adding the experimental packages to apt, but no issues in the installation, as was the case when I tried it with MEPIS.