kdm not startking kicker/kwin properly

["A.J. Aranyosi" <aja@mit.edu>]

Hi,

Having a weird kde problem (I'm a Gentoo user myself, but it's my
girlfriend's machine, and I'm less familiar with Debian).  She's using
Testing, running KDE 3.2.2; these problems appeared when she upgraded
from stable to testing.  The symptoms are these (in order, from less
bizarre to more bizarre):

1) Logging in from either kdm or xdm returns to the login screen (Big
Shock: Some Error Caused X Startup To Fail) - same happens with an
account created explicitly for testing;

2) ~$USER/.xsession-errors is empty;

3) /var/log/XFree86.0.0g and /var/log/kdm.log have no useful info about
the error;

4) She has no problem logging in using a failsafe WM;

5) After logging in using a failsafe WM, she can run kwin and kicker
from the command line and get essentially a fully-working KDE system;

So there doesn't seem to be anything wrong with KDE, but for some reason
she can't use it to login properly.  It looks like kdm is not starting
kwin properly for some reason.  Any ideas what might be the problem?