I'm installing linux on an external USB hard drive. I have a partition for openSUSE, Debian, and shared /home partition, and some NTFS space. I have previously installed openSUSE on one partition and have just installed Debian (Sarge, testing) on the other. However, when I log into KDE as my non-root user, I am confronted with an error "Applet Loading Error - KDE Panel" and then tells me to check my installation. Then, my kicker lacks a K Menu, a virtual desktop switcher, a list of running applications, the process tray, and the clock. This does not occur when I login at the shell as root and run startx. Everything works fine as root.

Any help would be much appreciated, as this is virtually unusable at its current state.

Hm... try this...
from Konsole.
Maybe you have a copy of kicker in sbin that works that you could copy to /usr/bin/ (and change ownership through the Properties box)?
I think you could try making a new user and seeing if that works.
I edited my X config file in Debian once and the X server crashed if I use my personal user, so I deleted it and made a new one. That seemed to clear up the problem.

While Windows users reformat their hdds, we just recreate our users and laugh.

you don't need to recreate users. at a shell prompt do cd ~ as user and remove the .kde directory to wipe all of kde's settings. when you start kde as the user again it will write default settings in .kde. (btw to delete it do rm -rf .kde)

It worked. Thanks guys!!!!!