Starting up KDE hangs with a black desktop and movable mouse
cursor...

Hello.

Yesterday on my home Debian system (workstation), I exited KDE and X 
back to console/text mode and restarted it (startx) but now I get a 
hang. I see a black desktop/GUI/X with a movable mouse cursor after 
seeing NVIDIA logo and an one second gray desktop. I have to use 
ctrl-alt-backspace to kill X to get out of it.

I did some investigations and experiments. I tried making a new shell 
account, ran startx, saw KDE's wizard, skipped it, and it hung again. I 
tried it again and went through the wizard with defaults, and same hang 
after KDE's wizard closed.

I tried recompiling NVIDIA driver, but that didn't make any differences. 
I tried deleting everything in /tmp and it didn't fix the problem. I 
tried renaming my .kde/ directory to start clean, but that didn't fix it 
either. I tried switching from KDE to Gnome, and Gnome worked without 
any problems. So, it seems like KDE is broken somewhere but I am still 
stomped on why. I think the last time I restarted X was like a few weeks 
ago. I restarted it today because I saw kdelib package upgraded with 
today's apt-get update. I already tried uninstalling it and running 
startx, and still got the hang. I guess KDE doesn't use those files 
during its boot up.

I checked around for logs:
dmesg said:
agpgart: Found an AGP 3.5 compliant device at 0000:00:00.0.
agpgart: Putting AGP V3 device at 0000:00:00.0 into 8x mode
agpgart: Putting AGP V3 device at 0000:01:00.0 into 8x mode
$ more .xsession-errors
Xsession: X session started for ant at Thu Nov 15 22:24:37 PST 2007
startkde: Starting up..

You can find more logs, ps aux listing, other experimentations, etc. in 
http://www.kde-forum.org/thread.php?threadid=17919 (too long to post in 
this newgroup post).

Any ideas? Thank you in advance. :)
-- 
"At high tide the fish eat ants; at low tide the ants eat fish."
--Thai 
Proverb
    /\___/\
   / /\ /\ \      Phillip/Ant @ http://antfarm.ma.cx (Personal Web Site)
  | |o   o| |        Ant's Quality Foraged Links (AQFL): http://aqfl.net
     \ _ /       Remove ANT from e-mail address: philpi@earthlink.netANT
      ( )                                           or ANTant@zimage.com