recovering kde setup

[Richard Lyons <richard@the-place.net>]

I stupidly posted this on the tail of another thread, so it sank without 
trace.  Excuse the repetition, then.

I managed to create some mysterious freeze-up when restarting KDE (Konqueror 
looking for a now-not-mounted partition that I had been looking at in the 
previous session).  This meant that I had to close down KDE 
(should that be 'Klose down'?) by logging on from another machine and killing 
stuff until it klosed.  I made many attempts, trying to find the right thing 
to remove to prevent the old session being reconstructed, and having to kill 
a stack of processes remotely each time. Every time it completed loading, 
reconstituted the session and froze.  I even rebooted a couple of times. 
Even when I managed to get rid of Konqueror, the mouse remained frozen in 
KDE.  I idly tried a reboot into the old RedHat system, and it worked to my 
surprise.  Of course, sharing the /home partition was never a great idea... 
It did get rid of the session data that caused the mouse to freeze up, but it 
got rid of a lot else too:  most of the menus, and the taskbar. THe Redhat is 
running an older version of KDE, so no real surprise there.   Now when I 
reboot into Debian, KDE starts, the CD and CDRW are mountable, but most of 
the kde configuration is screwed, and I have no tasks in the taskbar.  
Minimise anything and it is gone!.  Anyone know how to re-constitute the KDE 
setup?

I am running KDE 3.1.2 on a 2.4.21-xfs kernel.

TIA
-- 
richard