I've found the settings for automatic locking and turned it off. This has worked in that I no longer need to enter my password when waking the computer. But there's still a big orange screen in the way which I need to click through or hit escape to dismiss before I can actually see the desktop. Can this be disabled at all?
Try:
If it doesn't work, then use dconf-tools and use dconf-editor to set the same setting manually.