If you use the KDE Address book, you can download KBirthday as a kicker applet which warns you of any birthdays/anniversaries in your KDE Address Book. Cool. eh?

Also you can download kickarts. If you use the KDE arts system for your sound, sometimes it causes problems in certain games, such as LBreakout and Emilia Pinball. Kickarts enables you to Start, Suspend and Terminate the sound server from your kicker bar.

The problem I had was that whenever I put kickarts or KBirthday on my kicker bar, they disappeared next time I loaded KDE!! I don't know if the problem was unique to my computer, Mandrake, or is a general one.

The solution?

First, put the applets on your Kicker bar and configure KBirthday to taste.

Second, start a terminal and type in:

cd ~/.kde/share/config
cp kickerrc kickerrc.backup

Now log out and select "Log in as different user"

Whilst at the select user menu, press CTRL-ALT-F1 to go to a text screen. Log on as yourself, and type:

cd ~/.kde/share/config
cp kickerrc.backup kickerrc

Press CTRL-ALT-F7 and log back into KDE.

Everything should now be okay, and future exits and restarts will work properly.

Question: Why did this happen to KBirthday and Kickarts and nothing else?

Answer: I don't know, but who cares? I won!

DAVE