i guess i've been playing with fire and had it coming.....
a few months ago i changed uprmi's sources from the installation cd's to several ftp mirrors: rutgers, plf, jpackage, texstar; and started adding software and upgrading my programs. i first had problems when i downloaded kdemultimedia 3.1.3-(3, i think) and several progs such as noatun stopped working. after checking what version of kde, kdelibs, etc. i was running i fixed this problem. yesterday, however, i went crazy and tried to get the latest kde artwork, kdemultimedia, kdebase, etc. (i am not a brand newbie but pretty close). the installation failed, and i realized too late that i should have accepted the uninstallation of several packages which urpmi said was necessary. end result: i can't login to kde. gdm (which i've never understood why gdm and not kdm is my login manager, they both appear in the kmenu) gives an error immediately after logging in sayin "session lasted less than 10 secs, check config". so luckily i can get into gnome but i have no idea how to fix my system. does anybody have advice on restoring my entire kde to working order ( istarted out with mkd 9.1's implementation of 3.1) or upgrading everything to 3.1.X-X to where it will work? right now as i mentioned i can't access kde, and any selection of packages from urpmi (either the online srcs or cd's) gives dozens of required packages that are unavailable or wrong version, or it asks to uninstall more things before i can upgrade which is how it all started in the first place....
any help-instructions, links, whathaveyou- greatly appreciated

try getting rid of kde entirely

urpme kde

will give you all the packages. Uninstall them one by one. Actually, if you uninstall kde-base, it should tell you that it's going to uninstall a whole bunch of things.
- Make sure you have no trace of kde packages.
- Deactivate the ftp urpmi sites. Install kde from cds.
- Then, add texstar as a source (nothing else!!!) and upgrade kde. One thing that might have happened is that urpmi just mixed packages from tex and plf or contrib which can lead to trouble.