And, of course, at times of experimentation, backups are even more important than 'normal' times.

spoovy - don't underestimate your power to help. Being very new to Linux you probably see things a little differently from those of us that have been around some time, but then so will others that are struggling and needing your help.

OK I think i've gone as far as i can with this. I have had limited success sync-ing my calender, contacts and to-do list, which is all I initially wanted to sync anyway.

I say limited success because the only way I can get dropbox to work reliably in KDE is by installing Nautilus and associated packages as well, which is not ideal I suppose. That said, it doesn't actually bother me to have Nautilus on my box, as it doesn't seem to do that hostile desktop takeover thing anymore (maybe it never did on KDE?).

There are two alternative methods I found to run dropbox without Nautilus, but both had the same fault. I had to use the source available on the db website as the RPMs available will bring in Nautilus as a dependency. First I extracted the db package to ~ folder then added a link to the daemon in KDE Autostart. This appeared to work (and did work on first boot) but on subsequent boots the daemon would not automatically sync; having to be restarted each time. The second method was to create a script in /etc/init.d with controlling links in rc.d's (script is available on the dropbox website). This appeared to work; when I checked the running processes the dropbox process would show up. But the same problem occurred as the previous method - the daemon had to be restarted each time to refresh the dropbox folder. And with this method no icon appeared in the systray either.

So the only method I found in the end was to install Nautilus then install the RPM package (Fedora 10 RPM on my my Fedora 12 box). Copying std.ics and std.vcf from ~/.kde/share/apps/korganizer and ../kabc to ~/Dropbox and replacing them with symlinks pointing to those dropbox locations then syncs calender items, contacts and to-do's. I never touched the rc files and nothing bad seems to have happened.

Kontact will not update itself when either data file is updated - it had to be restarted to update. Not a problem for me as I never have both machines running at the same time.