Where does the kde menu system locate it's config & .desktop files?

From looking at my older system it *appears* that the menu system just displays whatever .desktop files are located in ~/.kde/share/applnk but on my new install Debian etch system ~/.kde/share/applnk is empty.

What I was trying to do was to get the two systems to share a common /home partition, however the installed apps are not identical on each system so each should have it's own individual menu system. I figured I could do this by moving the menu files to a new folder on the / partition called /menus then setting up a link in the /home partition which would point to the files in /menus.

but I can't find the files!

Thanks

Hmmm, this isn't really an answer to your question, but I think you might be going about this in the wrong way.
It is quite difficult to have 2 distros sharing a single home directory, because they'll be running different versions of different applications, and those applications need their setup files in your home directory (/home/user/.kde is going to be a big & complicated one for example).

When I have been running 2 distros on the same box and tried to stay sane, I managed it by creating a different username for each distro eg: me-Deb and me-MDK. Then arrange your file permissions ( & make links where appropriate ) so that each user (& they are both you!) has access to the other's (data) files. This keeps the application's config files safely separate.

HTH

The differing versions of the applications doesn't seem to cause too much problem, in fact that is one of the reasons I want to do it this way, it saves a lot of application setup. What I am actually doing is trying to replace my old Kanotix BH9 system with a Debian "etch" netinstall upgraded to "sid". I want the transition to be virtually seamless, the "other user" demands that it must be that way.
Both systems are very similar & use virtually the same applications but there are a few differences...for instance "kmplayer" on the old system is "kplayer" on the new. The old system has been updated several times but it's getting to the point where I'm afraid another upgrade might break it. It has some unsolveable bugs as well.
Replacing the system sounds easy...just grab the latest Kanotix & switch over but not so. The latest Kanotix has some sort of bug in it that gives a segmentation fault on some apps & the next to latest (which I actually had set up & running for a couple of months) falls over sloppy dead trying to upgrade to the latest xorg (really dead...as in reinstall required dead).
So I'm trying to get a Debian "sid" system set up as an identical but modernized version of the old system. This may take quite a while...