I have read the faq on freerock site but the kde menu is ever wrong.
I have do this:
$ export XDG_CONFIG_DIRS=/opt/kde/etc/xdg near the top of startkde script
run kbuildsycoca from Konsole.
This help don'work, the improper menus persist.

Be more specific. Improper in what way precisely??

Sorry, I'm italian and my english is bad.
If you go to gsb.freerock.org/faqs you can see my problem.

Your English is fine, but their description of the menus being "all messed up" are not what I would call a helpful method to illustrate a problem. This could mean a host of various ailments. If the KDE menu was changed (and they give no further specifics so again it is basically a useless description), you might try and tell exactly what is different so a member here can try and assist with the issue.

Hi

I used to have the same problem. Your KDE menus are "all messed up" in every sense of the word I suppose.

Some main menu entries are gone. Some new ones have appeared. The order of the menu entries is messed; some menus appear in different places. The icons of every main menu are gone. They are shown as a standard folder icon.....

That's what I remember. I remember having messed with some packages (gnome-menu or something like that) and made a script to fix it (which basically unistalled some GNOME menu packages, deleted some $user/.kde..... config files and reinstalled the GNOME menu packages and ran a kbuildsycoca) And made a custom menu called "GNOME" (with a modified KDE menu settings file) under which were all my GNOME apps. And made a .tgz package with all that stuff.

I will post it later. (I'm connecting from a cybercafe).

By the way I don't remember having exported anything. Maybe that is the error. In any case you can restore your KDE menus searching for the files inside /opt/kde/etc/xdg inside your KDE packages and restoring them by hand. (that also works).

Hi

Basically, kbuildsycoca should work. You do not have to export anything, but you do have to check your home dir for some personalized xdg file that shouldn't be there (that's the problem).

This is the complete path :

/opt/kde/etc/xdg/menus/applications.menu

If this file has been changed, restore it. If there is another copy creeping in your home directory, delete it. That will also delete all customizations you might have done it to your menus. It's needed by now so do it. (another way - the most extreme one, is to delete your home user directory and your user sockets in /tmp, and starting KDE again, with the welcome screen and optimizations chooser, etc)

After that your KDE menu will return to sanity. But it will still be somewhat ugly (crowded).

You can create an entry for GNOME (called GNOME or GNOMEapps or whatever you want) in your applications.menu file (that's what I did and that's what the package I made does) You decide what customizations do you want.

You should also try adding a

export LC_ALL=it_IT

to your session starter script. That's just if you log in from runlevel 3 or KDM (GDM lets you choose your language) You can also try to match the theme of your GTK apps running in KDE. Create a gtkrc-2.0 file in your home directory.

May the Force be with you!

I just renamed my /etc/xdg/menus file to /etc/xdg/menus.messed.up. This brought the icons back to K Menu but the arrangement of categories was still wrong (Internet, Multimedia, etc). So I took a copy of .config/menus/applications-kmenuedit.menu for another machine on which I'd just installed Slackware and used it to replace the existing copy(basically I just renamed the existing copy to applications-kmenuedit.menu.messed.up). After that, my K Menu was back to normal! I should mention that this is on Slackware 12.2 with KDE 3.5.10. On KDE 4.x, the solution to this problem may not be the same. I have no idea.
Perhaps you can also run kbuildsyscoca instead of copying the applications-kmenuedit.menu from somewhere else, but I did not try this. At any rate, here's my kmenuedit.menu in case it may be of any use to others:
folkenfanel's tips were crucial in helping me to arrive at the solution. (the original post is from 2006, so this is clearly a long-running problem).