On Saturday 26 February 2011 04:50:50 David C. Rankin wrote: > I need some help figuring out where to start in trying to keep kde4 from > loading most of kde3 when kde4 is launched from the kdm chooser. Just a wild guess from someone who spent quite a while trying to get KDE 3.5.n installed in /opt load in an environment with 3.5.m was installed in /usr (where n>m): what is your $KDEDIRS variable? (Note the fact that KDE has used singular and plural of this variable over the years). Additionally, I suppose it might be an XDG thing. Take a look inside some of the .desktop files, e.g. for plasma: /usr/share/autostart/plasma-desktop.desktop: [Desktop Entry] Exec=plasma-desktop X-DBUS-StartupType=wait Name=Plasma Desktop Workspace <snip translations> Type=Service X-KDE-StartupNotify=false OnlyShowIn=KDE; X-KDE-autostart-phase=0 The key here is that something detected that you're in KDE, and hence the OnlyShowIn=KDE kicked in and loaded it. I know much less than other on this list about how these XDG things work, but it seems to me you might need to have some new option for OnlyShowIn for KDE3 or TRINITY or somesuch. Pete.