Help! Need to Reinstall KDE

[bad_aptitude]

I seem to have Krippled my KDE desktop and I would like to reinstall it (the siduction way). Everything else seems to be working including Fluxbox. I tried deleting the kde setting files and even deleted the whole .kde directory but the problems persist. (no window borders, no drag and drop, no text entry into kde applications)
I would prefer not to  have to do a bare metal re-installation from the live cd since I have so many applications installed.

[dibl]

I'm a KDE user with average experience in configuration, and I know nothing about setting up fluxbox, but I must say I'm skeptical that simply reinstalling kde-full, or something like that, is going to fix the configuration problems on your system.  Are you sure that when you set up fluxbox you didn't bugger some configuration settings that KDE needs?  I've always used KDM and kwin (the package kde-window-manager) for the KDE login and window management, so I don't know what happens when you set up fluxbox to do those, over KDE.  If you don't have window borders, for example, that is something that kwin provides, and if you're running fluxbox then I would suppose that fluxbox takes over that function.

If you open a terminal and try to run a simple KDE package, like kate, does it throw any useful error messages?

[michaa7]

Fluxbox is my default DE since years. And I have KDE installed, and use KDM for login. No clue what you might have messed up. Only thing I can say: No prob with fluxbox, KDM and KDE. But note: isn't there a user directory .KDE4 (not .KDE), and there could be involved a user directory .qt, too.

[dibl]

On a current KDE 4.8.4 installation, there is only ~.kde.  There is a font setting under ~.config/kde.org/systemsettings.conf but I don't see how that would have any effect on these problems.

To try something, I would recommend doing this (as root in a terminal):

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apt-get install --reinstall kde-window-manager

Then "exit" the root login, which will return you to a user prompt.  There you can try this:

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kwin --replace

and then open one of your user software packages and see if you have window borders.  If you do, then that tells us that kwin works.  But if the running DE is fluxbox, then I guess the original problem with missing window borders would be a fluxbox configuration issue.

[bad_aptitude]

Thanks Dibl,
I just mentioned that fluxbox was working to point out that "x" seemed to be functioning properly. My problems with kde started before I had even tried a fluxbox session.
I did try restoring, from backup, all of my home directory configuration files that had anything to do with kde, but nothing fixed the krippled condition.
I finally just did a reinstall of kde-full.
I was able to restore my old .kde file from backup.(love that <backintime> ) So things are pretty much back to my original setup.
Thanks again for your suggestions.