I'm curious about using KDE on my Windows box (Windows XP, i686 machine, 1.5GB RAM), and I was wondering if installing the 'KDE on Windows' suite installed a K desktop in place of the Windows desktop.

I want to know this because I prefer the K Desktop over the XP interface. XP's looks are growing old and stale.

If you install KDE on Windows, you can run the plasma desktop either on top of or in place of explorer (though running in place of explorer isn't recommended at this point). However, KDE isn't very well integrated with Windows services (primarily the start menu programs), and there are some pieces missing that you would expect from a typical KDE install (e.g. Konsole, Krunner, and Kwin). If you do install it then be patient, expect things to crash, things to be missing or not work right. KDE on Windows is still considered beta software.

That said, I've been running plasma desktop on top of explorer for several months and have been relatively happy with it. Currently there is a bug in versions 4.3.4 and later that causes things to crash and services to not start properly making those versions practically unusable; but version 4.3.3 runs fairly well with only occasional problems.