Tried to download a few pictures from the camera in Digikam today. Oops, managed to crash both Digikam and Myth (which uses Qt for rendering). Any attempt to start Digikam would peg the machine for a few minutes and then silently kill all the open KDE-based apps (e.g. Konsole, MythFrontend).

Turns out there was a half-completed KDE 3.4.0 install, and since KDE is packaged as 5 or 6 separate packages, having KDE graphics fail had not backed out the KDE base install. When I rebooted to run Windows I'd booted back into 3.4.0 (I'd noticed this, but hadn't really been concerned about it). But since it was KDE graphics that failed to install, starting a package that uses it made a serious mess.

So, unmerged all of the KDE 3.4.0 sub-packages that wound up getting installed and restarted X... oops. Didn't automatically pick up the 3.3.2 install, so I'm back to some unreasonably ugly window manager. So re-emerge kde top-level package... no luck... kdebase... almost there as soon as it starts: the text rendering is severely messed up (regular text in menus shows up as series of brackets), but at least I can use the desktop while it rebuilds.

May be time to do a complete rebuild of KDE (especially since I've downgraded Qt to work around the bug in MythTV)... or even a complete system rebuild from scratch... though that would be more to see if it still works than for any real need :) .