Plasma broken
 

Whenever I login to my KDE desktop, I get this error message:A Fatal Error Occurred
The application Plasma Workspace (plasma) crashed and caused the signal 11 (SIGSEGV).

I can alt-F2 and get a command line up to run applications and firefox opens automatically. The desktop is black and blank, no panel loads.How do I fix plasma to load so I can see my desktop.

Have you checked for an update for your Plasma Workspace? Or checked to see if any kind of crash/bug report has been filed about this? Which distro are you running?

I've checked the bug reports and tried the fixes, did not work. I'm running ubuntu 8.10,and that's when the trouble started,when I updated to 8.10 from 8.04, before that,KDE worked.

I had the same problem and it was related to plasma-appletsrc file in .kde4/share/config. I was managed to solve the problem with following steps.

1. open konsole and move the current .kde4 folder: mv .kde4 .kde4-old
2. logout and login again, this will create you new desktop and a new .kde4 folder. All is reseted to default.
3. To get your desktop back the way it was you can just spend some time to create the shortcuts etc. yourself or you can copy parts that you need from the backed-up plasma-appletsrc (.kde4-old/share/config/plasma-appletsrc)

It could be that you need to copy some other files over from the backed-up .kde4-old folder to get all your setting as they where. One, maybe easier, possibility is to copy just the newly created plasma-appletsrc to the backed up file and rename that to from .kde4-old to .kde4 again. Then all the other files are as they where. I have not tried this, so I don't know what's going to happen.