Fedora 7 was working perfectly, starting all the routines I wanted to start at boot-up - Skype, Kmix, etc. I'd created a "startem" in ~/.kde/Autostart to do that, and was delighted with it.

Then I let it do a full Yum update (overnight) and the following morning experimented briefly with Bluetooth File Manager and Kbluetooth. They didn't work, so I abandoned that idea.

Now, on bootup the machine tries to start Skype and Kmix twice - once with the correct settings as in "startem", and again with wrong ones, and then it tries to start the Bluetooth stuff and some more.

I can't find where is the "startup" setting for the duplicates. Can anyone offer any suggestions?

You don't need to make any startup entries for Kmix, you just set it to dock in the panel and it will be there everytime you login. I'm not sure if the same holds true for Skype, if it docks into the panel then chances are you don't need a startup for Skype either. I suggest you right click it and see what options you get.

If they are still missing when you log in again then check your session manager and make sure there is a check mark in the section On Login--> Restore previous session.

That was the fix - thanks! I turned off session manager, and the wrongly configured KMix and Skype, and the failing Bluetooth stuff all went away on the next restart. I didn't realise there is a session manager - turning it off was the answer.