Hot on the heels of the release of KDE 4.4.4 and the first RC of 4.5 come KDE 4.4.5 and 4.5 RC2. While RC2 is just as stable (at minimum) as RC1, it remains dog-slow (compared to 4.4.4), even on 11.2. Here is, in fact, the rather odd Krux of the Konundrum I referred to - KDE 4.4.4 (which is the default for the 11.3 RCs, which, as yet, have no AMD proprietary driver support, which is the only 3D driver that my HD5450 can use) is faster on 11.3 than KDE 4.5 RC2 on 11.2 with said Linux driver (from the AMD driver repo) in place.
Because of this, KDE 4.4.5 (which succeeds 4.4.4) scares me.