I have had a problem on a few occasions where I open konqueror and it cannot see the home directory of my main user, alan. Similarly kedit and other programs cannot open the home directory. On the command line the home directory is seen fine.

However, if another user logs in they can see their homes fine.

If I log into kde as root then root cannot see /home/alan/

Rebooting the Pc did not cure this.

As far as I can see the problem seems to be related to nfs. When this happened today I had /home/alan mounted as read only on my netbook (Asus Eeepc). Eventually the problem was cured by closing down the netbook and re-booting the PC.

So I am puzzled. Is it possible that having my home directory mounted on another device interferes with kde seeing home?

This is the relevant line from exports

/home/alan 192.168.1.153(ro,sync,all_squash,anonuid=1007,anongid=100)

Hmm.. nfs should (when configured correctly) be transparent to the user. Do you get some error messages? This happens to me as well once in a while. I usually get an error related to DCOP. "Couldn't connect to DCOP-server" or something. It gives the same symptoms tho. My solution is to start a console and do:
rm ~/.DCOPserver_*
I have to logoff kde and on again for this to work. However, it don't think this is the solution unless you have got that error message. Anyway, it could be worth try.

I cannot see anything obviously relevant in syslog