> One of the few areas where gnus is awkward is the handling of
> frames/windows when replying to mail.  I've looked over the gnus
> configuration capabilities, but either it doesn't offer quite enough
> or I'm too ignorant to use it correctly (yes, probably the latter).  I
> also searched in various places and came up basically empty.

No, you're right.  It is awkward.  This has come up before on the
mailing list but there's no real satisfying solution.  As you've
already worked out with Kai, the defaults (in a single frame) are
pretty reasonable.

> 1. Giving the reply its own frame.  This would work fine, but I've had
>    a heck of a time getting the frame to go away (delete or iconify)
>    when done and having the original frame be unaffected by the reply
>    creation.  It would also be nice for general mail composition, not
>    just replying.

It gets really weird when you want to have your message buffer in a
different frame.  I use the following which works quite well, but I
feel like I shouldn't have had to do so much work to get it that way.

I use a large window dedicated to Gnus.  I put my group, article and
summary configs here for illustration