Ok, when I installed Redhat 9.0 on my laptop I just chose to install the Gnome desktop. Granted the Nautilus browser is not all that good but after a couple of weeks I am used to Gnome and I like the feel.

Discovered today that I could switch to a KDE desktop even though I NEVER installed it. Anyway I thought I would try it out so I installed the whole KDE package using the 'install/remove application' utility.

After playing around with it for a while I have decided I don't want it on my machine so I had a look in 'install/remove applications' and it will only let me remove the 'non-core/extra' KDE stuff. No 'tick box' is present to remove the whole KDE package. WHY???!!!!!

I am wary of just going in as the super user and purging everything with KDE in the file name. I don't want to end up trashing my desktop and getting errors all the time.

no, don't just erase the file, do "rpm -qa | grep kde"
any core kde stuff you can do "rpm -e kde-***"
but you don't actually want to remove kde unless you're very short on disk space because some programs need kde libraries to work (anything using qt).
i don't use kde or gnome, i use fluxbox but i still keep kde and gnome installed because i use kde and gnome apps (grip, quanta, superkaramba...)

EDIT: if you decide you need to uninstall kde you will have to uninstall all the kde/qt-based apps that you have installed from RPMs, because they all depend on kdelib, which in turn depends on kdecore and these apps all have other apps which depend on them...

So you are saying that redhat must have installed it because I needed it for libaries for a KDE depended application (or some similar reason).

In that case I will leave the KDE stuff well alone.

no, redhat installed it because it is the default desktop environment, but yes, you should leave it well alone