I have a similar problem. When I look at .xsession-errors, I see the following: kfmclient: ERROR: Couldn't start konqueror from konqueror.desktop: KDEInit could not launch 'kioexec'. kioexec: Unknown option '--silent'. kioexec: Use --help to get a list of available command line options. I did some grepping around in .kde and /etc, and couldn't find --silent anywhere. The funny thing is that it only happens sometimes. Mark