kde 3.1 woes
 

Okay...somehow, after applying some sort of theme/icon/button change in control center today, kde wacked out and started using up all my ram and was accessing the hard drive like crazy.

Rebooting led to more problems - loading my user account, the splash screen doesn't show up and it takes 5 minutes for the panel to appear and the icons don't appear. I can't do anything under this account, nothing works and the computer sounds like it's trying to run every single program i have.

The root account works fine in kde, the main account works fine in gnome, but i don't want to permanently use gnome as a workaround.

I created a new account and transferred my files to that one, but i'm having some permissions problems - I copied my files from the old account to the new, and I'm not sure how to move all my files without compromising too much security.

Can anyone help? I haven't seen anyone report this problem yet, but I hope I'm not the only one.

comments on your problem
 

The high disk usage and extremely slow responce means that you are swapping. The swapping is somehow caused by your new settings. Your new settings are causing KDE to use an inordinate amount of memory. I don't know why. Perhaps KDE is loading the same thing over and over again.

Your idea of abandoning the old user and its screwed up KDE settings is as good as any. You can put your new user ownership straight by moving everything to newuser and issuing the following command (assuming a username of newuser and a groupname of allofus).
chown newuser:allofus /home/newuser/* -R

or you can try reverting kde to its default state when you first installed by going in to your home directory of the original problematic user and deleting the .kde directory then kde will be god as new
just know that you loose all previous kde settings but since you already made a new user i assumed you wouldnt mind that

cheers

Thank you for the replies, I'm going to try them out right now.

This forum has to be the most helpful and most quick to respond board I've ever joined, I love it.

:D

it worked!
 

I just deleted the old .kde directory and everything works perfectly. Thank you both for the help!