Hi I'm running a HP Pavillion zv6000 laptop, thats dual booting Windows XP and openSUSE 10.0. It is using KDE and I'm having a problem with the desktop. Every so often, without any apparent reason, the desktop decides to crash. Its odd though, although the toolbar disapears and programs on the desktop won't open, instances of programs that are already running work without any problems. I can also access the shut down pannel by hitting control + alt + delete, but the system goes to a black screen and won't shut down. Does anyone have any idea of what might be causing this or what I should do? Please let me know if there is a man page I need to read or if I need to post more info on my setup.

Regards,
Jack

PS - Remeber I'm a n00b, don't get mad, I don't know any better ;P

Hello Jack
As you wrote
always keep a Konsole session opened.
And when KDE crash occurs, go to the Konsole and look for error messages in :
~/.xsession-errors (the '~' character stands for the home directory of the current logged in user, /home/<user name> )
/var/log/Xorg.0.log
/var/log/messages

Look at the end of the files for the last error messages.

Also what KDE version do you use ?
Is your installation well updated with all the last versions of packages ?

It's often suggested to rename the directory :
~/.kde (note the '.' character to point to a hidden directory)
to
~/.kde.bak
and restart KDE to let it create a new .kde directory with default configuration files.
Try it and tell if this works for you.
See you...