safe emergency shutdown?

[Peter Christensen <christenpet@snip.net>]

I'm fairly new to Debian and Linux, so this may have the most obvious answer, 
but here's what happened:

I added an application to the panel in kde (I think that's what it's called; 
it's the strip along the bottom where you can click to activate the console, 
help, etc.)  This worked OK, but the new icon was hidden behind the scroll 
arrows on the right side, so I tried moving it to the left.  At that point 
nothing worked again on the panel.  I was able to get to the console by doing 
an alt-F1 (I think) and then shut down the system safely.  But this morning I 
tried to remove the new icon from the panel.  And again, the panel froze, so 
I couldn't start any applications.  Also, the keyboard was dead.  Alt-Fn 
didn't work, ctrl-alt-del did nothing, and even when I hit the caps-lock the 
caps-lock light didn't go on.  The mouse still worked, but I couldn't start 
any applications.  So I ended up turning the power off.  

I understand that bad things can happen if you just turn off the power while 
Linux is running.  But it seemed that I had no alternative.  Any idea what 
happened here, and what I should have done to get out of it?

Thanks,
Peter Christensen