I don't know about the ELILO situation, but Google can help you there -- I've not experimented with that at all.
However, the running KDE, kdeinit, or messagebus, should all have nothing to do with ELILO or LILO as far as I know; they're totally unrelated
As for the start menu, or, if you ever find that suddenly KDE stuff stops working, or like Konqueror won't open any files or whatever, try the stuff I gave in post#4 -- there's a load of bugs in KDE 3.x.x - 4.x.x and a lot of it has to do with kdeinit dying, and/or kdesu not working.
I'm curious what you learn about this ELILO thing
so if you find out what's up, do post back about it! PS - maybe ELILO's been broken from the get-go, and now it works
like it should!?
Sasha