[Nottingham] KDE Startup problem

[David Aldred]

Problem with a friend's linux machine...  it's  Dell, running Mandrake 10.1 
and KDE 3.3 I think - for the reasons below I can't check very much with her 
by phone)!

She's done something to it, no idea what - thinks the last thing she did was 
change a sound in System Notifications.  Now, on KDE startup:

- Everything runs extremely slowly (switching to a console and doing top 
reveals a kedinit process taking 99%+ or processor time: killing that gets 
things going faster).

- Whether or not the kdeinit process has been killed, when KDE finally does 
appear to have started fully (menu bar appeared), there are lots (she says 
about 30) windows on the screen, each titled 'notification', and containing 
the Information logo, the word 'activate', and an OK button: clicking the 
'OK' button appears to do nothing.

I wondered if she had accidentally told the sound system to use a non-existent 
sound player or something, forcing a loop of a failure message trying to play 
a sound and thus another failure message until everythin locks up.  However, 
it could really be anything!

Strikes me I could do with a KDE startup log file or similar, but I don't know 
where there is one -  /var/log on my machine, with much the same 
configuration, doesn't seem to contain kde.log or anything else helpfully 
named!). 

The machine in question is going to be here later this evening in the hope 
that I can sort something out:  anyone got any helpful thoughts?

TIA......

-- 
David Aldred