This is probably not precisely a KDE problem, but I would appreciate any suggestions that might help me troubleshoot.

I have a brand new System76 desktop machine. It shipped with Ubuntu 8.10 and Gnome. Overnight I downloaded and installed most of KDE 4.2.0 from the Ubuntu Intrepid-backports repositories. I see the same behavior in KDE that I saw at first in Gnome.

First login after a reboot everything seems to work fine. But if I log out and try to log back in, it hangs up at the same place in the login sequence. In KDE it puts up the splash screen, then the out-of-focus hard drive icon, then hangs at that point. The drive icon never comes into focus.

I've never seen this behavior before, so I've never paid that much attention to the KDE login sequence. I assume the drive icon refers to initializing hardware. Does that suggest anything about where to look for possible problems?

I've asked on the System76 support forums and I'm getting some feedback on possible hardware problems, but this doesn't feel like a hardware problem to me. Any suggestions of what to look for would be greatly appreciated.

Is there any sign of the cause in /var/log/Xorg.0.log or ~/.xsession-errors?