KDE on laptop startup hangs
 

Ive got this problem that kde hangs on startup of my laptop - gnome seems to work fine.

when i first installed mandrake, i selected gnome as the default gui. when it finished installing it booted fine, and i restarted into windows to load some files off of my network, onto my laptop (onto an NTFS partition) then when i restarted, i chose kde, and it loaded a (not sure what you call it) 'loading picture' to the middle of the screen. this had little icons and it processed each until it got to the end one, when it got there, it said restoring previous session. it hung at 85% for over 1 hour, before i switched it off
when i rebooted into linux, it automatically launched kde and it hung in the same place again. I could press ctrl, alt F2 to get a (cant remember what you call this either) prompt or console or something, but am unsure what to do with it - i did reinstall mandrake a couple of times but this hasn't resolved the problem