I noticed that my own account's khotkeysrc file is stored in the root account's locked media:/sda2/root/.kde/share/config directory. Why would it be stored there?--I didn't make it as root. It complicates backing up my account, by forcing me to become root or get into the root account in order to copy khotkeysrc. I know it's not much of a complication, but it seems stupid that my account doesn't own a file I made in it.

Edit: Correction - I didn't literally edit the file. I edited the menus with the KDE Menu Editor, and it wrote the information in khotkeysrc. But it's the same difference to me. The menu items and hotkeys are for my account, so backing up my /home should include them.

No clue why it did that, sorry. Maybe a setting has that as your default, maybe you did it while changing something else and kcontrol (or whatever program) still had you logged in as administrator. Either way, the fix shouldn't be too hard, just copy the file to your own /home/username/.kde/share/config/khotkeysrc directory (or whatever directory your distro uses), and if needed, chmod/chgrp the permissions. Then restart KDE, and it should work.

Oops. This was my fault. There are copies of khotkeysrc in both root and my account, and I was looking at the wrong one (the one in root). I somehow didn't find the one in my account when I looked before.