Folks,

I can see by the many other posts on the subject that this has caused a lot of bother but all I want is for KDE to start right.

I stupidly tried to install some new software (xine 0.99xxxx) and ended up
having to reinstall most of KDE as it all got removed - no exaggeration.

The system will come up fine and log me in automatically, it just won't start the KDE gui. I know that I can run startkde (and this works) and I know I could add "exec startkde" to a bunch of other files but what I want is
my system back the way it was, ie select Kernel at LILO screen and then
commence work, not start issuing commands to get where I want to go.

System is Mandrake 9.2 and KDE is KDE 3.1

BTW, I have an identical setup on my laptop which works just fine.
Obviously there is some file somewhere which controls this behaviour
and it's none of the usual .xinitrc, .xsession etc.

Help would be greatly appreciated as it's really beginning to
annoy me.

Have you checked your /etc/inittab to make sure your init is set to 5?

Right, had a look at the inittab and I have a line:
id:5:initdefault:

I'm presuming this is what you mean.

Just to clarify, kdm kicks in OK, but all I get is the equivalent of launching
directly to failsafe mode (within a graphical style environment).

Issuing the startkde command on the xterm works fine and brings up
KDE but I didn't have to do this before it crashed and now I cannot close
that xterm screen as it's what called KDE.

Any other thoughts or suggestions?