This has happened three times now and I'm stuck. Here's the situation: Mandrake 9.1/KDE3.1.0/GNOME 2.2 vanilla... Everything was working fine with GNOME and, for a short time, with KDE. But, while innocently checking my mail, I moved to the kicker in KDE, I noticed that my menu had whittled itself down to a couple of options and no available programs. I thought this was a kmenu thing and, after editing and saving and editing and reloading, I had to come to the conclusion that this was anything but a simple menu problem... Then, I began to look around and noticed that all my settings were erased if they were part of ~/.kde/apps. I'm thinking some random process overwrote my settings and the Mandrake defaults. My problem is that this is basically fatal. I never know when this is going to happen and I'm sick of deleting my configuration files and reconfiguring every time KDE chokes. I'm just interested if anybody has found a long-term solution or even if anybody else is suffering from this. Please help me. Thanks
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Edit: Oh, I also failed to mention that I have attempted to do the obvious and simply download and install a newer version of KDE, but something corrupts my rpm db and it crashes from a fatal error. It seems like the only option is a fourth overhaul or compiling KDE 3.1.3 from scratch (but I don't even know if the bug is fixed... I can't find any reference to it anywhere). This really really sucks!

I am running SuSE 8.1 with KDE 3.1.3 and gnome 2.0. I have not had your problem at all with KDE 3.1.3. Nor did I have it when I ran KDE 3.1.0. I did have a similar problem a while back with 3.0.x. It occured twice and I had to fix it each time by deleting /home/user/.kde. The problem went away the next time I upgraded KDE, but I think that the upgraded version was 3.1.0, which fact is puzzling because 3.1.0 is what you are experiencing the problem on.

This may be a hardware problem if it appears random. I recently had random type problems with my box. I did notice that the cpu seemed to be running hot so I rejigged the cpu fan and the cpu now runs a lot cooler and the box is stable as. It may also be flaky RAM do you have spare that you can plug in to test this.

Thanks so much for the quick replies. I'm kind of stuck right now because I can't install anything without a complete rebuild.

Sornen: I have noticed a small spike in the cpu temp, but nothing too far out of range. In fact, it's running much cooler than it did when I was running gentoo, and gentoo never seemed to miss a beat.

I'm pretty sure this is a KDE thing because it's happened in exactly the same way to precisely the same files and nothing ever went wrong while in GNOME... but it affects the whole distribution, which is distressing. Anyway, I think I'm going to have to just install Mdk 9.2 beta2. I was interested in seeing how far Mandrake has come since 7. Everything else seems great! They really do a very good job of making an OS anybody can use, from a sysadmin to a housewife (almost...).

But if anybody else has this problem, I would love to know. I looked all over the bug lists and never found it mentioned, but my hardware is pretty generic and nothing is overclocked or messed with, so...

Thanks all! I'll post a followup as soon as I have my box up and running...

Did you install/remove some software?

I ran into this problem after installing a newer version of Mozilla, and removing the original default version.