This sounded too interesting not to look up. I assumed that "krell" was a reference to the film Forbidden Planet (the space-opera version of Willy Shakespeare's The Tempest with Leslie Nielsen as the Capt. Kirk character and "Oscar" from the Six Million Dollar Man as the Mr. Scott engineer character). In the film, the Krell are an extinct race of all-powerful beings on the planet Altair IV (heh heh) whose knowledge of science far exceeds our own capacity to understand blah blah blah. Part of the Krell's legacy is an enormous power-generation machine.

But the real deal is here. Apparently, I'm close: "A krell is a unit of measurement used in the horizontal display of various measurements." If you recall FP, there are hundreds of power indicators arranged horizontally around one room.

Could it be that the GTK people are too removed from the origin of the word "krell," as the film is never mentioned in any of the gkrellm docs? Hmmmm...

-a