Gnome - KDE user problems?

[DSC Siltec <dscpubl@siltec.lt>]

Hi --

    I have Sid, but used to have Woody -- the problem seems to be
independant of the choice here.  The problem also seems to be possibly
related to both KDE 2.x and Gnome, so perhaps independant of that, too.

   I use KDM for login.

   Anyhow, back in my Woody days (2 weeks ago), I was temporarily using
TWM to play a full-screen game (BumpRace or Freecraft both do this, I
don't remember which it was at that time), and the game crashed,
resulting in an inoperative screen.  So I ctrl-alt-bksp'd out to KDM,
and tried to log in with KDE's window manager.  All of a sudden KDE
couldn't start up.  That is, I would get the initial gears, startup
process, and all, and then it would crash and drop me back into KDM.

   Well, I had been wanting to upgrade KDE anyhow to 3.0, and I knew
that you had to uninstall it, so I simply switched to Gnome, and started
using that.  I then upgraded to Sid as well, trying to get my system up
to KDE 3.0 level.

   Next, my ALSA sound manager refused to work with Freecraft.  Maybe
related, maybe not... but no big problem, anyhow.

   But today, (no further crashes, though I did have a mouse conflict
between bumprace and Mozilla running at the same time, resulting in me
quitting Mozilla)  I went to log in to Gnome, and got the nice startup
screen, but all the surrounding menus never loaded.  I can bring up a
mini-menu by middle-button-clicking, and can run my programs, but there
seems to be some kind of a block here.

   When I log in as a different user -- no problem -- for both KDE and
Gnome.  So I think the problem might be with some set of user 
configuration files, possibly (?) file corruption.

   Does anybody have an idea about what is destabilizing my system, and
-- more importantly how to reset these things back to "working"?  Or are
there files that I can simply transfer from another user's directory to 
my own, to reset everything?

  - Mike