Hello

Has anyone had issues with KMail 1.x not working at all, as in not even connecting to a valid mail server, yet Kmail2 is fine?

I cannot get the kmail in Trinity to function in the newer release but it works fine in the older version. It simply will not at all connect to any email server..

I would advise you to verify that the Trinty and KDE 4 installations are not conflicting with each other. This should be visible in the form of error messages in ~/.xsession-errors indicating failure to load components, etc.