I burned yesterday a live CD containing a Debian version of the KDE4 (beta) as I wanted to take a look at this novelty.
A minute after booting from this CD on my IBM/T23 laptop I couldn't believe my eyes...
Instead of starting Xorg/Kde4 as expected I saw a broken mixture of my everyday desktop background picture and a small piece of a www page I visited appr. 10 minutes before I booted from this CD !

It seems that this live KDE version tried reading some of my /home/user/ files along with some Opera cache fossils !

After some of my mouse/key clicking reaction it finally went to its own X/KDE system as it should. Not very stable IMHO.

I tested many live distros that way and never saw anything like that !

Is there a question in there somewhere? Or is that a "warning", even though you don't specify where you got the CD images from, etc. ?

The source is here:

http://pkg-kde.alioth.debian.org/iso...ve-cd-i386.iso

Has anybody tried this one ?

Usually when X starts up it displays whatever was left on the screen before it last shutdown/restarted I have no idea why though

Hmm, it sounds possible at 1st sight, but the effect took place AFTER complete reboot of the machine so the only source of software involved at this moment is Live CDROM.

So it means that all RAM memory should be actually cleared from previous state IMHO.

Maybe these artifacts were taken from /tmp of my HDD ?
Some Live distros mount automatically all partitions found on the HDD without user prompt.

That's something I'd be careful with; a mounted partition can easily be damaged, and with live-cds I don't usually fancy the idea of mounting the disk as it's usually unneeded.

KDE4 is indeed not stable yet, but it's ok since it's still Beta. I tried it trough Qemu and mainly it just crashed or even hanged (so I had to restart Qemu to get a new try), but hopefully it'll get better in the new versions..it did look ok to me, maybe a little too Vista-OSX-like, but good. Felt a little heavy for me. And of course there were pieces here and there that weren't finished yet (like app icons in the panel showed only question marks, so apparently the icons are either missing or not working yet).

It's probable that the live-cd did mount your SWAP or other partitions from your harddisk, but that does sound odd to me..I don't think it's about "leftovers" in RAM or anything, those should be cleared at reboot as far as I know. I might be wrong, but anyway..maybe re-try with the live-cd and try to see what is mounted and what not? If it's not about mounted partitions, then ask from the CD makers what it could be? It would be interesting to know..for privacy, if nothing else.

I find it does that even when I'm booting a different distro that is not mounting the other paritition