A ring $R$ with identity is called strongly clean if every element of $R$ is the sum of an idempotent and a unit that commute. For a commutative local ring $R$, $n=3,4$, and $m, k, s \in {\mathbb N}$ it is proved that ${\mathbb M}_n(R)$ is strongly clean if and only if ${\mathbb M}_n(R[[x]])$ is strongly clean if and only if ${\mathbb M}_n(R[[x_1, x_2, \ldots, x_m]])$ is strongly clean if and only if $ {\mathbb M}_n(\frac{R[x]}{(x^{k})})$ is strongly clean if and only if $ {\mathbb M}_n(\dfrac{R[x_{1}, x_{2}, \ldots , x_{s}]}{(x^{n_1}_{1}, x^{n_{2}}_{2}, \ldots , x^{n_{s}}_{s})}) $ is strongly clean if and only if ${\mathbb M}_n(R \propto R)$ is strongly clean where $ R\propto R=\{\scriptsize(\begin{array}{@{}c@{\quad}c@{}} a& b \\ 0& a \end{array}): a, b \in R \}$ is the trivial extension of $R$. This extends a result of J. Chen, X. Yang and Y. Zhou [$\mathbf{5}$] from $n=2$ to 3 and 4.

The question is addressed of when all pure-projective modules are direct sums of finitely presented modules. It is proved that this is the case over hereditary noetherian rings. Partial results are obtained for uniserial rings. Some of the methods are model-theoretic, and the techniques developed using these may be of interest in their own right.