KDE not really usable after upgrade.,, and clobbering xfce panel

[mweishaa]

So a while ago I switched from KDE to XFCE because there was an often-runaway dbus process that would consume all of the cpu and require reboot. With the upgrade from 11.10 to 12.04 I decided to check out KDE again. It was pretty much unusable. There was no decoration on the windows and I couldn't change it. The menus would open up behind windows, config changes weren't taking effect.... etc. etc. Upon logging out and going back into XFCE my panel in there was clobbered and empty. So I had to rebuild it. I have reproduced this scenario.

So I really have two questions:
1. how can I "reset" my kde post-upgrade? I tried to remove ~/.kde but it didn't help.
2. why is it clobbering my xfce configuration? That seems odd. I honestly want to come back to kde, but obviously only if it works.

I hope there are some answers, and I hope it is not "install it from scratch". I've gotten used to upgrades working properly.

[sam81]

uhmm.... if removing ~/.kde didn't work, maybe you should have a look at ~/.config and ~/.local there is some kde related stuff there as well, in particular akonadi stuff. Maybe you could also try to see what happens if things work well for a newly created user.

[vw72]

As for your runaway process consuming 100% cpu, do you happen to have an nvidia card? The current nvidia drivers don't play well with some nvidia cards. Telling KDE to use Xrender instead of OpenGL or switching to the open source driver solves the issue until the nvidia developers fix the driver.

[mweishaa]

sam81, I poked around in .config and .local, but didn't have much luck. It just seems like such a big issue that I thought there had to be an easy solution.

vw72, if I recall right, it was a dbus process and all my reasearch turned up no luck in solving it. I never heard it was an nvidia problem. I do have an nvidia card now, but I didn't when I was seeing the problem. If I could get KDE to work right again, I'd give it another shot and see if the cpu issue came back.

I would like to be able to give KDE another chance because I've been using it since... 2001 I think. But the fact that trying out KDE is messing up my xfce desktop concerns me. It means I can't really flip back and forth to troubleshoot. So that means I just stick with xfce because it's working.