control panel (Kontrollleiste) changes style and layout

…on its own.
It’s a very strange behaviour. I just installed 11.1, downloaded the factory 3.2.90… KDE (because I had more severe problems with the default 3.5.1… KDE), but right from the start (it was a clean install on a 64 bit system with 8 GB RAM) I faced strange problems.
One is that the control panel is far too big, but I guess I have to live with that for now. More important and extremely annoying: The style changes (I don’t know how to set it permanently) with every restart, and the layout changes, too. With every restart of the system, the different areas (beginning from the K-Menu to the windowlist) are positioned opposite to their position of the previous run. I.e.: when the K-menu was at the left at one start, it is on the right at the next start, and then again on the left on the following start etc.
The desktop-changer or switcher (I don’t know the exact word in English, in German it’s “Arbeitsflächen-Umschalter”) which is meant next to the K-menu on the left side, then appears next to the K-menu on the right side, and so on.
I could live with one of the two options, but not with the fact that it’s changing positions at every start. That makes working with the PC extremely difficult, because I always get confused. And I don’t think restarting the desktop just to change this is a good way to solve the problem. There should be other ways.

I looked for other posts which describe this problem, but it’s hard to find appropriate search terms - and I didn’t find anything. So, my apologies in case this has been asked and solved elsewhere already.

no clue anybody?

downloaded the factory 3.2.90… KDE (because I had more severe problems with the default 3.5.1
This really makes no sense to me.

kde3 from a default install should work brilliantly. Add the Community Build Service kde3 repo if you want a newer version
But 3.2 is making no sense??

Clarify please

Sorry, I meant 4.2.90 - it’as a typo

I think your solution would be to do this from the CLI, not logged in the graphical desktop.

mv /home/username*/.kde4 .kde4old

(*username = replace with your username)

Log back in an it will be all new
If you really need some stuff from the old .kde4 you will find it in the renamed folder .kde4_old

Thanks for the advide, but I don’t do that. It’s only one small problem, that the control panel doesn’t keep it’s setting, and you ask me to give up the entire settings of all my KDE-programs?
I’m not a beginner. I’ve worked with KDE for about 10 years now. I have used many KDE apps, for which i have stored individual settings. They are all in the .kde4 folder now. And I’m not giving them up!
I just would need to know where the config-file for the control panel is in order to get that straight (I hope at least), because then I would remove/rename that file and see what happens.

You are correct, but the only other option is, and I think this is correct:

kquitapp plasma && rm ~/.kde4/share/config/plasma* && plasma &

Sorry for the very late reply. I tried that and got this response:

<unknown program name>(20770)/: "Application plasma could not be found using service org.kde.plasma and path /MainApplication."