Well, for this morning's adventures with KDE 4.3.1, it is telling me it can't find the shared libraries for the Xine and Gstreamer multimedia backends.
Nothing has changed. Both Xine and Gstreamer are installed, but just to make sure I un-intalled and re-installed them both.

I think it is about time to write off KDE 4.whatever until maybe version 4.5.10?

In the meantime I'll use Xfce and access what KDE application I like from there. Of course Amarok won't work if KDE can't find Xine, but no great loss. There are other audio players.

Sounds like a distro/packaging issue, not much we can do about that.

Make sure everything is installed to the right prefix, and matching versions of everything.

I finally re-formatted the /root partition and did a fresh install. All is well for the moment.