In Slackware 10.2, I copy-pasted my xorg.conf from SuSE 10.0 to get my X working (because xorgsetup didn't work and xorgconfig was too complex, or the other way around). However, Kicker refuses to load, giving me an error message when I start up X. I can actually see that the Kicker is there (it's transparent, but I can see a Firefox button, show desktop, and system monitor, so I assume it's there). When I close the error message, it pops back up again. After a while of this, I logged out and booted up in SuSE, where of course it had messed up my KDE configuration (I use the same /home for both).

I don't remember exactly what the error message said, and I'm hesitant to replicate the error, as it messes up KDE in SuSE too. Why might this be happening, and how can I fix it?

If you mean you share the same /home/<user>, dont do this.

Create distinct home directories. For example, I use Slack (2.4.32), Slack (2.6.15), Debian, and SUSE. My /home directory has:

/home/steve-sl
/home/steve-st
/home/steve-de
/home/steve-su

You will experience all kinds of wierdness if you share your users home directories between distros.

You can temporarily rename the ~/.kde directory and see if the problems disappear. Boot Slack into runlevel 3 instead of 4 and then from the command line type mv ~/.kde ~/.kde-old. Then start X/KDE with the startx command script.

KDE will re-run the Personalizer tool and you'll be sitting with all the default settings as well as a new ~/.kde directory, but at least this approach provides you a clue whether the problem is in your user config files or with system config files. If the problem disappears then you know the problem is in your user config files.

You also could then restore the old ~./kde directory but temporarily rename the kickerrc config file. KDE will create a new config file when restarting KDE, and you'll again see a default Kicker. But this might help troubleshoot the problem.

Another idea is to temporarily rename the ~/.kde/share/apps/kicker directory.

There are also a bunch of temp files that can be deleted with no ill effect. Some of those files are located in /tmp and others in /var/tmp. Just be sure to not be logged into KDE and your user account when deleting or renaming all of these files.

is suse uses xorg?? or is it xfree86