OK, I reinstalled Redhat 8 on my laptop and upgraded to KDE 3.1 w/ apt-get. Now I can't get Konqueror to run except from the command line and woese, KDE Control Center has none of the modules available, just the search option so now I can't even enable the battery status applet. What am I missing? I've tried reinstalling KDE, and the problem comes back. I guess it's a problem w/ their packages and I'll probably have to reinstall packages straight from KDE.org. What's everybody's take on this? Should I just attempt to (for the first time) compile KDE on my own? What do I need to do this? Is there a guide or it pretty straightforward? Any fixes or suggestions would be welcome.

hmm... you can try to remove your user kde settings ~/.kde... If you want to install KDE from scratch you will need to download some source tarballs:
qt3 (GUI toolkit)
arts (sound server)
kde-base (the main kde system)
(and optional kde packages eg. kde-multimedia, kde-internet etc...)

read more on http://www.kde.org and http://www.trolltech.com/

I just fixed it by uninstalling KDE completely and using the rpms from kde.org. Looks like the KDE packages at my apt repository are a little broken.