I am a little baffled.

I had to turn off my computer for 30 minutes, and when I went to turn it back on I ended up hitting the reset button on my powerbar.
Needless to say, Slackware does not like to be powered off suddenly.
Once I was able to load slack again, I signed into my user account and all my settings have been changed = fonts, I lost my panel that I added to the right of my screen, my theme has been defaulted back to the original KDE.
I am under the suspision that there are user folders where I can try and recover my settings. the catch is that I dont know where they are as I am still a full-fledged NEWB.

If any one understands what I am describing and knows how to assist I would appreciate the help.

The local settings are normally saved in the ~/.kde directory. What I suspect happened is that the contents became corrupted and the system replaced the corrupt information from the skeleton files used to setup new users.
It's live and learn I guess. You can just apply your new changes and make it better then it was before!

ive had lots of things go bad in my system when the power goes out unexpectedly.

isnt this a huge downfall, compared to windows, that you loose, sometimes critical, data? and in my case, power on the computer to a now unfunctional system? i had to reformat because of it (the hardware is fine though).

in windows when this happens, i have never lost any data or files that i had.. iv always wondered why linux is so much more sensitive to an abrupt or unscheduled power off? i think work needs to be done in that area to prevent data loss.. even in events like power outages.

I think that is because in windows you can't access/change processes which are running. However, it can be done in Linux in runtime. So power lost sometimes corrupt them.

I've found just the opposite. With Windoze I've lost entire files from a crash. Never lost anything in Slackware. In fact, just last week some dipstick turned off all our circuit breakers when he posted the power bill outside the front door. There were 4 Slackware boxen running, one a server, and not one file was lost or corrupted on any of them ... except for maybe the one box running KDE, where sometime recently the system sounds quit working.

There is a common denominator here ... KDE ... poorly coded DE.

thanks Alien.. what you said makes sense.

Chinaman, i dunno.. what can i do different to prevent this then, if yours never messes up (slack)? and plz note, im not trying to make this a windows vs linux point.. i really want to know why it does get messed up, and how i can prevent it.. because i dont like the idea of my entire OS being destroyed, because the power went out.

Try using UPS.

the point is, i dont need one or use one in windows.. and during power failures, the system and all of its files are fine.
in linux, as you mentioned, the files can get corrupted after an abrupt power short. is the only solution to pay money and get a ups? it doesnt make any sense to me that i would have to.. does everyone else here have one?

I don't have one. It was only a suggestion. Don't know a sollution(maybe journalling filesystem is the best). Files also get corrupted in windows but windows does aka "presave" which sometimes helps to get earlier versions of them.

Perhaps it is because I use ReiserFS in Linux.
It's a journaled filesystem. Which do you use?

when i install linux i use reiserFS as well.

Unlike Windows, GNU/Linux GUIs run on top of the operating system. That is, users can run GNU/Linux without a GUI, much like the old days of DOS 6.x and Windows 3.x. Therefore I like to maintain two separate boot options in my boot loader menu so I can boot more easily into runlevel 3 (command line) or runlevel 4 (GUI). With both options always available to me I can more easily troubleshoot. Possibly the following might help:

Configuring Slackware for a GUI and a Command Line Startup

True, but if you use a journaling file system, which you do, then usually you can recover during the next reboot. Additionally, at the command line you can type touch /etc/forcefsck and the Slackware boot scripts will see this file and then force a file system check on all partitions.

I never have seen KDE corrupt that horrifically. Perhaps I'm just lucky. However, KDE does some basic housekeeping when exiting the GUI and shutting down. From my experience and observation, most of the problems occur with all the temporary files KDE creates. Most of those files are soft linked to files in /var/tmp/kdecache-username, /tmp/kde-username, /tmp/ksocket-username, and /tmp/mcop-username. Usually you can delete those files without serious issues. Also, KDE sometimes gets confused if the files ~/.ICEauthority, ~/.Xauthority, and ~/.DCOPserver* already exist when you next try to run KDE. Thus, manually deleting those files before launching KDE sometimes is helpful. This is an area where booting into runlevel 3 is nice because then you can clean house manually if necessary before starting KDE. I'm not a command line die-hard, and I tend to use Midnight Commander to manage and delete files from the command line.

KDE is so buggy I'm not interested in using it. It's similar to
Windows GUI in that things get changed without user participation,
even such things as sound. I use Fluxbox, and where I live there
are power outages for unexplained reasons, such as some dipstick
turning off the breakers. Though I run an UPS on each PC, sometimes
we're not here to shut them down. And the only one that has ever
had a problem is the one running KDE. The Fluxbox machinese never
do, nor does the headless server not running X.

I think if you ever get to the issue, you'll find it's KDE.

I'm a bit late to this conversation, but I would suggest that the reason you lost all your config is not due to "corruption" or filesystem problems, but, rather, the way in which KDE works.

I would guess that you'd only just set this lot up and hadn't exitted KDE since doing so. As Woodsman pointed out, KDE does basic housekeeping on exit - and by exiting ahead of schedule, you could've caused this apparent "horrific corruption", which is nothing more than the equivalent of loosing unsaved work.

I couldn't've said it better.
- Piete.

Sorry I am so late in posting my appreciation for the reply's.

The thought of KDE and having to safe files makes sense to me. Howver If I am in a position where I rarely have to reboot or shutdown my system what are some actions that I can perform in order to force a save or create something to backup my settings.

It appears that no other user on the system has had the same issue as me.

Now that I think about it a little there were two times that I had to restart my box and settings were fine. And I am not sure if I mentioned it in my first post, but kde was not even loaded yet when the power was turned off.

Any way - thanks again. Live and learn - all is good.