I can't get KDE 3.1 from dselect to install without it complaining repeatedly about dependency problems endlessly and my sources.list has a repository for it listed too. I've also tried building it from source which has resulted in the frusteration of it saying I need to set the environment variables when I run ./configure. How do I set environment variables and which ones do I need to set? I have also made sure to satisfy all needed dependencies.

Well I see your information says you are using Woody since KDE 3.1 never has and never will be in that branch were are you getting KDE from in your sources.list. If it is from the Debian archives then it will not work unless you upgrade your install to at least Sarge/testing. You need to go to www.apt-get.org and find a line for a backport for Woody then it should install. BTW you may want to try installing aptitude and using it or just apt-get itself. The errors you are getting and the contents of the sources.list would be nice to see as well.

Here is my soures.list:
deb cdrom: [Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 R2 _Woody_ - Official i386 Binary-2 (20031201) ] /unstable contrib main non-US /contrib non-US/main deb cdrom: [ Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 R2 _Woody_ - Official i386 Binary-1 (20031201) ] /unstable contrib main non-US/contrib non-US/main
deb http://security.debian.org/ stable/updates main

deb ftp://linux.upsa.es/pub/XFREE4.3/ ./
deb http://johan.dhs.org/~jimmy/ ./