I have this problem with KDE 3.1 whereby when I first upgraded to SuSE 9.0 via fresh install (ie backed up everything and reformatted the drive) and installed KDE 3.1, it worked perfectly. On day 2 however, after only upgrading the core components of KDE, it stopped working and I ended up in KVM (I believe).
After going to runlevel 3 and manually starting KDE, it presented a whole list of errors about not being able to start the windows, and various other file error messages, I decided to uninstall it, reboot, and reinstall it from the original SuSE cd's.
No joy.
Now the only way I can run it is by manually starting the KDE service via KVM, and it's decidely messy. What do I need to do to get KDE back up and running the way it was without having to re-install a fresh copy of Linux again?