If starting KDE becomes borked, such as a black screen after logging in, I will try the following:
Log out of everything as a regular user, and log into one of the virtual terminal as root.
Delete every file and directory in /tmp/ and /var/tmp and /var/run that is owned by my regular user. A file with bad permissions or a stale PID file can prevent some services from starting. You can even remove root's files in /tmp just before rebooting.
If that doesn't work, check $HOME/.xsession-errors. In earlier versions of KDE 4.0 I've seen this file grow to an incredible size. This prevented logging in at all.
For KDE4, you can try deleting (or renaming) the two files in $HOME/.kde4/share/config/ that have "plasma" in their name. You will end up needing to reconfigure your desktop, such as activities. wallpaper and the gadgets. But this is less drastic than deleting the entire .kde4 hidden directory.
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