I recently upgraded from Debian Lenny to Squeeze, and with it came the upgrade from KDE3.5 to KDE4. I haven't yet decided to keep or change my desktop to something else, but there's a highly annoying "feature" that I haven't been able to figure out yet.

Whenever I use the Search box in the kickoff menu, it returns stuff that is no longer on the machine. For example, if I search for "print" it returns KPrinter (which is no longer installed) and does not return kaddprinterwizard or the HPLIP gui. Neither of those programs are listed in the menu anywhere (I just found them in /usr/bin).

I guess my generic question is how do I automatically update the kickoff menu to show currently installed programs only?

Did you get rid of all of your old KDE 3.5 settings?

It's not clear to me how the settings were upgraded (i.e. backed up and replaced, just replaced, just left alone). My desktop didn't maintain things like wallpaper or anything like that. Should I just move my .kde folder to .kde-old and let it rebuild?

I would give that a try. You can always revert.

EDIT: You could also go in synaptic > origin > local and see if any old kde packages could be marked for complete removal ( getting rid of old configs.)

Well, I don't know about synaptic, but I did purge all files in aptitude that were marked "obsolete".

Ok, that would accomplish the same thing.

I'm going to mark this as solved because it appears to have magically resolved itself. Maybe it just took time to reset the menu after I purged the packages. I never really go around to moving the .kde directory, I don't really know what happened.