Help please - KDE GUI won't display

[Marsha Petry <MPetry@jabber.com>]

I did a dist-upgrade this morning, and now my initial KDE screen comes up
with an OK background but a black box where the user login should be.  I can
figure out where the text input boxes are for logging, but when I log in the
desktop shows my wallpaper with some icons scattered around and that's it.
Nothing happen if I click on icons, or rt-click, or left-click.

I'm using 'unstable' on a IBM Thinkpad T20. The new KDE worked fine 'til
today.  A big guess is that when a config screen came up saying something
like "if you want better rendering on your display, click yes" I selected
yes and caused all this - but I can't find where to undo that selection.

I've reinstalled KDE (3.1), KDM, xserver* and reconfig'd just about every
package.  No luck.  Now I'm saving my files to try and reinstall OS.

Is there a log of what was done in the latest dist-upgrade so that I can see
what was upgraded this morning?  In all the reinstalling, I did an apt-get
clean so I don't have cached packages.  Probably dumb, but I'm getting a
little desparate.

Please help with any info you can.

Thanks
Marsha