My KDE isn't working properly. I'm running Mandriva LE 2005 and the following is happening:

When I startx I find that the kmenu is the width of the screen when I open it. Then when I try to run any KDE application it crashes. Other applications work e.g. Konsole, Firefox, Openoffice. However things like Amarok, Kmail, and all of the KDE system configuration applets just crash, including configuring Konqueror.

EDIT: Oh and this happens in the root account too so it's not anything to do with my home account.

I can't for the life of me figure out what caused this. My installation is only two days old as I migrated to a new disk so I basically installed LE 2005 afresh and then installed all my other software again. All that software worked fine on my old installation of LE 2005.

The system was running stable for two days until I removed the old hard disk, I can't see how this was a problem as it wasn't mounted half the time. I also added a FAT32 partition to my new disk to share with XP (dual boot) unplugged the old harddisk and plugged in my CDRW drive then when I restarted all the problems appeared.

It seems to be some core KDE files that are corrupted or missing as KDE files seem to be the only ones affected.

Is it possible to reinstall just KDE, or how do I fix this?

I uninstalled and then reinstalled the following RPM: libkdecore4-3.3.2-123mdk
but it didn't help.

Below is a debug print-out of what happened when Kmail crashed:

(no debugging symbols found)
Using host libthread_db library "/lib/tls/libthread_db.so.1".
(no debugging symbols found)
(no debugging symbols found)
(no debugging symbols found)
(no debugging symbols found)
(no debugging symbols found)
(no debugging symbols found)
(no debugging symbols found)
(no debugging symbols found)
(no debugging symbols found)
(no debugging symbols found)
(no debugging symbols found)
(no debugging symbols found)
(no debugging symbols found)
(no debugging symbols found)
(no debugging symbols found)
(no debugging symbols found)
(no debugging symbols found)
(no debugging symbols found)
(no debugging symbols found)
(no debugging symbols found)
(no debugging symbols found)
(no debugging symbols found)
(no debugging symbols found)
(no debugging symbols found)
(no debugging symbols found)
(no debugging symbols found)
(no debugging symbols found)
(no debugging symbols found)
(no debugging symbols found)
(no debugging symbols found)
(no debugging symbols found)
(no debugging symbols found)
(no debugging symbols found)
(no debugging symbols found)
(no debugging symbols found)
(no debugging symbols found)
(no debugging symbols found)
(no debugging symbols found)
(no debugging symbols found)
(no debugging symbols found)
(no debugging symbols found)
(no debugging symbols found)
(no debugging symbols found)
(no debugging symbols found)
(no debugging symbols found)
(no debugging symbols found)
(no debugging symbols found)
(no debugging symbols found)
(no debugging symbols found)
(no debugging symbols found)
(no debugging symbols found)
(no debugging symbols found)
(no debugging symbols found)
[Thread debugging using libthread_db enabled]
[New Thread -1244748096 (LWP 20538)]
(no debugging symbols found)
(no debugging symbols found)
(no debugging symbols found)
(no debugging symbols found)
(no debugging symbols found)
(no debugging symbols found)
(no debugging symbols found)
[KCrash handler]
#7 0xb5d5817b in strlen () from /lib/tls/libc.so.6
#8 0xb67de711 in QString::fromUtf8 () from /usr/lib/qt3/lib/libqt-mt.so.3
#9 0xb5c3ee0c in ?? ()
#10 0x0000092b in ?? ()
#11 0x00000000 in ?? ()
#12 0xbffff110 in ?? ()
#13 0x0818a9a0 in ?? ()
#14 0xb5c38000 in ?? ()
#15 0x00000871 in ?? ()
#16 0x000000a5 in ?? ()
#17 0x000000b4 in ?? ()
#18 0x08178938 in ?? ()
#19 0xbffff138 in ?? ()
#20 0xb6c141d0 in ?? () from /usr/lib/libkdecore.so.4
#21 0x08109038 in ?? ()
#22 0xb7f91fcc in typeinfo name for GlobalSettings ()
from /usr/lib/libkmailprivate.so.0
#23 0xbffff148 in ?? ()
#24 0xb6c141d0 in ?? () from /usr/lib/libkdecore.so.4
#25 0xacba76f6 in ?? ()
#26 0xffffffff in ?? ()
#27 0xbffff238 in ?? ()
#28 0xb6b4382b in KLocale::translate_priv () from /usr/lib/libkdecore.so.4

Hard to say what happend with KDE, however, if it's some major problems, try removing .kde all- together:

rm ~/.kde

then restart and maybe a currupted config file will re-create and correct itself. If it's also a new install... maybe just try to re-install MDK...

KC

I'm not sure removing ~/.kde will do anything as I'm having the same problems as root. I'm trying to avoid a reinstall because I spent 2 days tyring to get everything back to how it was. It could be that I reinstall Mandrake spend two days reinstalling and it happens again :-(

have a look at the X log. What does it say?