[kde-linux] Seriously broken under Gentoo

[David J Iannucci]

All,

I'm in a serious bind... I have a nice brand-new install of Gentoo with
KDE 3.5.9 that was working fine until yesterday.  Then, in the process
of trying to debug something not directly related to KDE or X, I removed
a couple packages (specifically "skim" and "skim-scim-anthy"). After
that, my KDE apps are thoroughly screwed.

I can get my KDE desktop up and running fine, but most or all the apps
tend to hang up, either right away or after a few seconds.  The
symptom with konsole, for example, is that the interior of the window
never gets refreshed (so the little bouncing cursor that shows it's
starting up just leaves little copies of itself all over the place).
Finally a dialog comes up saying something like "the application is
not responding, would you like to terminate it or leave it running?".
Same symptoms for kpdf.  Konqueror and Kuickshow run for a little bit,
then lock up.

I realize this is likely to be a problem closely related to Gentoo's
packaging system, and so there may not be many people here in a position
to help, but I thought I'd try, because I posted on Gentoo's forums, but
haven't gotten a helpful response there yet.

Thanks for any help you can give.

Dave