Well, for this morning's adventures with KDE 4.whatever, it is telling me it can't find the shared libraries for the Xine and Gstreamer multimedia backends.
Nothing has changed. Both Xine and Gstreamer are installed, but just to make sure I un-intalled and re-installed them both.

I think it is about time to write off KDE 4.whatever until maybe version 4.5.10?

In the meantime I'll use Xfce and access what KDE application I like from there. Of course Amarok won't work if KDE can't find Xine, but no great loss. There are other audio players.

Well did you upgrade your KDE? Did you do anything at all? I don't think xine and gstreamer should vanish automagically. Can you describe what sort of "adventures" you are talking about to narrow down the problem?

Did I do anything? No.
At this point I've ran out of patience and have spent entirely too much time chasing down problems with KDE when I should be doing more important things; like making a living.
I'll use Xfce for now.
For business purposes I should just use XP and get it over with, but my dislike for mickeysoft runs so deep I'll continue with Slackware. After all, linux is the superior OS, but, unfortunately, it can't scan, fax, or do some multimedia functions without first having to jump through various hoops to get this and that to work. Xsane can't even do a decent scan unless you have a few hours to play "trial and error" to get one decent looking page. Add a few more pages and the resulting .pdf file is 4 or 5 times larger than a same file created with HP's software in XP..... Faxing is even worst...

Sorry, in one of those moods.... I'll get over it. Usually 20 minutes or so of running winbloat is the cure.

Well, it is raining cats and dogs and business is slow so I took the time to re-format the
/root partition and did a fresh install of Slackware64, the "True Multilib" files, and upgraded KDE 4.2.4 to 4.3.1. All is well for the moment.