Raymond> It seems that my KDE has gone the way of the
  Raymond> Dodo. I powered down and when i rebooted KDE
  Raymond> came up but none of the icon or
  Raymond> configuration changes that i have been
  Raymond> running were there anymore. ...

Just a wild guess here I don't see that anyone else
suggested ... did you do something while logged in
before that could have changed the ownership on KDE
files to root so that you can no longer use them?
I can no longer 

>From a console or terminal window execute

find $HOME ! -user $LOGNAME

If there's stuff in your home directory that is owned
by root (or any other user) that shouldn't be, it might
cause you problems. It's happened to me.

-- 
Lynn David Newton
Phoenix, AZ