suse11: black screen and cursor after changing splash screen

In one of my user accounts I went into Desktop Configuration: Look & Feel: Appearance: Splash Screen and changed to the “Default” one (the pretty icons floating above a shiny black surface). Also in the Screen Saver Settings section I selected an OpenGL screen saver.

Now when I login into that account selecting a “Session Type” of “KDE4” or “Default”, I briefly see the pretty color icons and then the screen goes black and I can move the cursor around but can do nothing else. (If I click the mouse in the lower right corner I see a flash of a white square but nothing else happens).

If I login into the same account with a Session Type of “IceWM” then I have no problems with the desktop or screen. And if I log into a different user account (in which I never changed any Desktop Configuration settings) I still see the good 'ole SUSE login progress bar and a normal KDE4 desktop.

Does someone know how I can put things right in the affected user account and get back to seeing the KDE4 desktop?

My hardware is a late model iMac with the ATI Radeon Mobility 2400.

When you log in with that user under another desktop environment like “IceWM”, go to your Home folder, find the .kde4 folder and either rename it or delete it. Log off then pick the KDE 4 session and log in. You should have the ‘default’ KDE 4 desktop.

Hurrah! That did the trick. Thank you.

Do you have any idea why changing the splash screen in that way dis-affected my system? I suppose I can experiment with it, now that I have such an easy way to recover.

At this point you probably should just chalk that up to the instability of KDE 4. Many here have had various random problems from the beginning and I still am encountering occasional weirdness with the latest 4.1.