Help with getting KDE to work again

[umagnum338 at netscape.net]

Hi,
 
A few nights ago, I was installing some packages and trying to get the OpenOffice 2.0 package to work.  I installed some packages for a mathematical graphing program and something else that I can't recall now.  In any event, I was using KDE at the time.  Now, whenever I type startx from the command line the X window system starts but then I get a message dialog box saying that kdeinit couldn't be started and to check my installation.
 
I can't see how adding the new packages could have blown up KDE (unless they quietly overwrote some shared object that KDE looks to).  Actually, my suspicion is that it has something to do with what I was trying to do to get OpenOffice working.  Every time I tried to start OpenOffice, I'd get an error on two shared objects.  I did a find and found that the objects were in the openoffice installation directories.  So, I read up on the ldconfig manual page and tried to reconfigure my ld.so.hints file (or ld-elf.so.hints, whatever it is).  It seemed to work, but I couldn't load OpenOffice.  So, once again I went to the ldconfig manual page and saw that I could specify files.  So, I specifically told ldconfig to add the files that OpenOffice was looking for.
 
However, when I did this ldconfig dumped a whole bunch of stuff to the screen and didn't seem to like the shared object file that OpenOffice wanted to have.  I wished I could remember what the names of the .so 's were but I can recall at this time is that once of them had something to do with Java.
 
What could be the problem?  Beyond /var/log/X.org.log where would KDE log errors to?  There seems to be very little to go on, and I haven't located any decent documentation on kdeinit to help me with command line options that might, perhaps, aide in debugging this.  Any help is appreciated because at this point, I can't use my X system.
 
Oh, by the way, I joined this mailing list using the e-mail address on the message, so replying to the list instead of me directly is ok.
 
Andy
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