I’ve tried everything that I can find, but my laptop screen still goes into powersave whether it’s plugged in or not.
I’ve gone into Configure Desktop > Display > Power Control and disabled it in there. I’ve gone into Configure Desktop > Advanced Tab > Power Management and unchecked “Let PowerDevil manage screen powersaving”
I’ve even tried editing the profiles with no luck.
If I go into SaX2 I don’t have any powersaving or screensaver options. Can anybody shed some light on this for me? It can’t be this difficult and I must be overlooking something obvious. Any help is appreciated. 
I recently installed KDE4.2 in my laptop (running OS 11.0) and the screen only gets darker on battery, never when the charger is connected. You may want to consider an update, IMHO 4.2 is muuuuch better/stable/functional than 4.1.
In Systemsettings - Advanced - Power Management - General you can see what profiles are running in which situation. Next Tab is Profiles where you can edit the appropriate profile. It opens with an Action tab open, down below is Screen/Monitor/Display (i’m on a dutch KDE) where you can adjust the behaviour of powermanagement. Setting it here makes the phenomenon you describe appear and disappear.
And, I do agree, 4.2.1. is much more stable, polished, functional. You can find tons of info on upgrading to 4.2.1. in the fora.
Check here:
Auto turn of monitor how to? - openSUSE Forums
but do consider to upgrade to KDE 4.2.1. I agree with brunomcl and Knurpht it’s a major upgrade over 4.1.3
Thanks for the help. I’ll check into setting those options and reading that post to see if it helps. This is my work laptop and it needs to be as stable as possible, so 4.2.x is not an option for me at the moment. I’ve got it running in a VM on a different machine and I’ve run into, and read that plenty of others have as well, too many plasma-related crashes. Maybe when 4.2.2 goes live I’ll upgrade this laptop to it. Thanks again for the help.
It was System Settings -> Desktop -> Screensaver that kept overriding my settings. Changed that from the default 4min setting and that fixed it. Thanks again.