These dependancies seem a little crazy to me (Abiword, Gnome, Gaim...)

[Dave M G]

Ubuntu Users,

I'm on Dapper Drake, 6.04.

I have the program abi-word installed on my system. I'd like to remove 
it. But, according to Synaptic, if I remove it, one of the other 
programs that will be removed is "Gnome".

I certainly don't want to lose my entire GUI just because I don't want 
to use a particular word processing program.

To make a long story short, because I've been looking around at the 
dependencies, I've noticed that there is a whole cluster of packages 
that are somehow linked together, or at least to Gnome, so I can't get 
rid of them without blowing away my desktop environment.

Such packages are Gaim, something called "project-management", "Gnumeric 
Spreadsheet", and a lot of others.

Gnome wasn't tied to all these superfluous applications in Ubuntu 5.10 
so far as I can tell. So why are they now impossible to get rid of? Or 
at least impossible if you want to keep using Gnome.

Thanks for your help.

--
Dave M G