Some KDE programs load extremely slowly after partial upgrade

[John O'Hagan <johnohagan@iprimus.com.au>]

Hi all,

I'm using sarge and KDE 3.3.2 (custom 2.6.12 kernel from debian sources), but 
recently made substantial upgrades from etch, mainly for all the Xorg and 
gcc-4 stuff, but also udev, alsa-modules, and anything else that took my 
fancy at the time!  

Subsequently there has been weird behaviour such as:

- Konqueror, kwrite, kate and (and kmail when started from konqueror), among 
others, take over a minute to load, except for the first time they are loaded 
in a session.

- Konqueror in superuser mode gradually loses the ability to call other 
programs as a session goes on.

- If X is restarted, KDE gets stuck at the "initializing system services" 
stage and a reboot is necessary to get it up again

There don't appear to be any runaway processes or excessive system load. Other 
programs seem to behave normally.

Does anyone have an idea what could be causing this?

Thanks,

John O'Hagan

p.s. Please CC me.