Problems with Fedora 9 and above and KDE. 

PROBLEM

When initially logging in to the new Fedora 9 following the upgrade, KDE 4.0 GUI started but all my settings were gone.  Except for my documents that I had in various places, the settings and configuration like KDE themes I had installed earlier, were now gone.  After about two reboots where after I played with KDE settings for display resolution, KDE refused to start and I had to press:

SOLUTION

1) CTRL-ALT-F1 (CTRL-ALT<F#> moves you between various running KDE and Command line sessions.  The default session you start with is on CTRL-ALT-F7 in case you need to return)

2) Enter my login.

3) Type ‘startx — :1‘ to get X server (base of KDE) started in a new process.  The new session started on instance accessible through CTRL-ALT-F9.

4) This braught me back to the original KDE GUI.

I wanted a base KDE session while I work on the bugs and problems in Fedora 9.  The above did just that.  In case you have trouble starting up X with KDE, give the above a try.