Hi!
I'm on kubuntu maverick meerkat, using kde 4.5.1. There were some driver issues with my Radeon graphics card. I was missing desktop effects and experienced bad video performance. Then I created a new user - and for this new user everything worked fine. So I tought: It's not the hardware, its not the driver - is it kde? Well, I purged .kde from my home directory and tataa- I had a wonderful desktop again. But soon I saw, that application data was gone, too. Amarok, digikam, kmail and many others were missing data. Of course, my nice panels were gone, too (Lucky me had made a backup copy of .kde, so no real damage). I did this a few times, purging and restoring .kde, because there is a lot of development going on in this place. Since this became a bit annoying, I searched the forums to find out, what has to be purged to force desktop to reconfigure itself. I found these destinations:
~/.kde
~/.config
~/.local
/tmp/.../*cache*$USER*
and a lot of other suggestions.

Now my question is: What has to be removed to force desktop into a complete reconfiguration without destroying any information that is not desktop related. Or even better, is there command to achieve this (eg: wipe_desktop_config -a --force)
regards
Hans-Peter

1st I'd go to systemsettings -> workspace appearance -> desktop effects -> and click default then apply for all three tabs


if that doesn't work I'd remove ~/.kde/share/config/kwinrc (there are others but this should suffice) and restart kde


note: different distros place kde files in diff directories - either ~/.kde or ~/.kde4