Transaction Recalculated Before Split Complete

[John W. Tiede]

Hello,

I have installed the gnucash-1.4.9-1.i586.rpm into
Linux-Mandrake 7.2 from the gnucash.org home site.
My past experience with double entry accounting has 
been to use a package called Finance Manager II for 
about the last 15 years.

I have set up a test "Chart of Accounts" with the
following accounts:

Acct Acct         Acct
Code Name         Type
---- ----         ----
1001 Asset 1      Bank
2001 Liability 1  Liability
3001 Equity       Equity
4001 Income 1     Income
4002 Income 2     Income
5001 Expense 1    Expense
5002 Expense 2    Expense

I want to enter a deposit to account "Asset 1" and 
"Expense 1" from "Income 1".  My income is $10, my 
expense is $2 (eg., a tax) and the deposit to my 
bank account is $8.

My expectation is...

Acct      |  Debit    |  Credit
-------------------------------
Asset 1   |    $8     |
Income 1  |           |  $10
Expense 1 |    $2     |

I double-clicked the "asset 1" account on the Chart 
of Accounts and open the register for this account.  
I enter the first line:

Date      | Num | Descrip | Account | R | Deposit | Withdrawal | Balance
------------------------------------------------------------------------
1/21/2001 |     | deposit | asset 1 | n | 8.00    |            | 8.00

I enter the second part of the transaction as $10 
from account "income 1", hit return and my deposit 
is recalculated as $10! I don't get a chance to 
enter "expense 1" as part of the split.

Date     |Action| Memo    | Account | R | Deposit | Withdrawal | Balance
------------------------------------------------------------------------
1/21/2001|      | deposit | asset 1 | n | 10.00 ! |            | 10.00
         |  *** |         | income 1|   | 10.00   |            |

I have done this with no action and with various 
other actions.  What is the purpose of "Action?"  
Is it for information only or does it control how 
the split is done?  Is this documented?  (Does the 
action "POS" stand for Point-of-Sale, for example?)

How do I enter the above split transaction?  Let's say 
that I have another transaction for "asset 1."  I 
have two sources of income ("income 1" & "income 2") 
and I go to the bank a deposit them at the same time.  
Can I enter this type of transaction to gnucash in 
one split?  What happens if the split is out of balance 
and I commit the transaction to the register?  Is there 
a warning, does it recalculate, or record it out of 
balance?

BTW, I read the help manual, have searched through 
the gnucash-user archive and set up test cases, but 
had no luck in figuring this out myself.

TIA for your help, I feel pretty clueless right now.

John Tiede