what distro is the easiest to upgrade kde in? I have redhat 7.3 and want to upgrade to the latest kde but it seems i have to download the latest redhat to get the latest kde. i downloaded the new kde rpms for a kde mirror but then i get these dependency problems when i try to install. seems there isn't a 7.3 rpm for kde, only 9.0.

So i was thinking maybe it would be easier to download the kde source & build it myself. maybe a bare rh linux install with fvwm & build the source for kde? before i go down that path, is it easier to upgrade kde in mandrake, debian, suse, etc?

Well, SuSE does offer a pretty decent upgrade support. As of now, they support every SuSE Linux from 7.2 on, which has gotten quite old...
I don't know what's like with the other distros. Gentoo has always have the latest software

If you are a little experienced, I have had no problem upgrading KDE in ArchLinux (archlinux.org).

If you are a beginner, I recommend ArkLinux (arklinux.org), it uses APT for upgrades, and is KDE-centric.

Mandrake has URPMI, that should be able to upgrade KDE without a problem either.