I am on Mageia 5, runnnig KDE 4.14.5 and Plasma 4.11.16. Ever since upgrade to this version I have a strange problem.

If another user is logged in and I use "switch user" to start a new login X session, chances are (i.e. often but not always) my new session will come up with the desktop entirely black and no desktop icons. The panel is still there, just as I would expect it. The reason being that on login I get switched to "New Activity", which was not present before and which has no defined background and no icons. Switching back to my default activity (which is still there) results in no change, because that has been switched from folder view to default desktop. If I switch it back to folder view, my icons re-appear -- all sorted vertically on the left hand side of the screen.

After some lengthy investigation, I have tracked it down to three files being changed inappropriately in .kde4/share/config. These are activitymanagerrc, plasma-desktop-appletsrc, plasma-desktoprc. Restoring these to their previous contents returns my subsequent KDE login to sanity.

As you can imagine, this is rather annoying. Any solutions?