I am running kubuntu 7.10 on a new dell (this has been a battle to get this distor working), I rebooted because kde had repeatedly crashed, and now after the login screen kde is dying, during the "loading the window manager step".

Any one offer help?

Yeah, use Gnome! I got sick of broken links and crashes with KDE (after a couple of years testing), no problems with Gnome to date.

hahaha very funny, I knew someone was going to say that. And the answer is NO!I have been using kde for nearly 9 years and I have had very few issues.

For anyone else reading this for help, what caused the problem was that I changed my hostname via the systemconfig dialog. In the home directory there are a bunch of stuff in the .kde directory, systemconfig messed things up in there and that lead to the problem. Luckily the originals were there so fixing was trivial. The file .xsessions-error had information about what was going wrong.

Actually it wasn't meant to be funny, just my experience of the two desktops.

I've had this problem too with my Debian etch installation on an oldish laptop. It turn out to be a permissions problem, so I made sure that my home directory was owned by me, and gdm was complaining about ~/.dmrc not having mode 644, and that my home directory needed to be owned by me, and that only I needed to have write permissions there. I did this:

chown -R sam /home/sam
chmod -R 644 /home/sam

but it didn't help much. I switched to kdm which doesn't seem to fussy (which is a bit of a mystery to me since I thought the two were unrelated)