Strange things keep happening when logging in. Regardless if I am running RH 9.0 or MDK 9.1, it appears that KDE is either dropping into 'failsafe' mode right after loading, or being overridden by GNOME.

Selecting KDE as my desktop, shortly after getting to my desired desktop, the system reverts to the BlueCurve background, GNOME desktop icons, and GNOME app menu. My taskbar items remain unchanged.

I am running KDE 3.1.2 on an Athlon 850 with 256MB RAM and a Voodoo3 32MB video card. The system seemed to be running fine up until recently, and it started misbehaving for no apparent reason (no hardware or software changes).

Ideas? I haven't been able to locate the appropriate log files which may give me an indication of what is going wrong, so any help there would also be appreciated.

First I don't think that there is a "failsafe" mode .Now if you talk about bluecurve which is the default *theme* in RH9.0 it is made such that it looks almost alike in both KDE and Gnome.If you prefer through metacity or through the theme manager change the themes and check out.
Also check the .Xclients-default file in $HOME in RH9.0 and the xclient settings in Mandy.

Thanks for the reply...I think I isolated the problem

It seems that if you add a non-KDE application to the KDE taskbar (i.e. nautilus), it somehow screws up the default desktop, and it reverts to GNOME.

Until I can come up with a way to work around this, I'll just refrain from dropping nautilus to the taskbar. Worked without it before, and I can do it again.

Thanks again for the help.

Jim