I have found this gui to be excellent up until recently, when the screensaver application froze, then upon reboot disappeared. It is annoying to see that such problems which I assumed were only common with windows is also easily possible under linux. Any ideas what happened?
None whatsoever. Never experienced anything like that in four years of using KDE3. Do you mean the application has disappeared off your applications menu?
yes, the screensaver under KDE 3.x is gone but works fine under KDE 4.x and GNOME 2.x;
Although I prefer the GUI look&feel of KDE to GNOME, it is my personal opinion that GNOME is more stable as an X based GUI.
moderated see below
Actually the screensaver under KDE 3.5 still works, because I had set it last week, BUT all the individual types of screensavers no longer appear for me to select a new one; the list does appear under KDE 4.x, so not sure what the deal is, since I think it is the same application?