I have a server VM that does not have KDE installed, but it has KDM, ark, and konsole installed. IceWM is the default window manager.
I've tested upgrading it to Mageia 2, and all kinds of extra KDE stuff gets pulled in in the upgrade, including task-kde4-minimal, leaving a broken KDE as the default window manager. I'm not 100% sure, but I think at least some of the reason all kinds of extra stuff gets pulled in is because Default-kde4-config and mageia-kde4-config-common both have added dependencies on plasma applets (plasma-applet-icontasks and plasma-applet-battery, respectively), which certainly seems wrong. I don't know if this accounts for all of the extra stuff getting pulled in. If I knew for sure, I'd file a bug. Also, as I alluded to, KDE installed with task-kde4-minimal is a bit broken. Some issues include no showdesktop widget being installed, and as soon as you log in, an error message: Warning: Cannot open ConsoleKit session: Unable to open session: Failed to connect to socket /var/run/dbus/system_bus Not sure if this is related, but when you don't have a sound device, Kmix in the system tray has a missing icon. Finally, even on a workstation installation with full KDE, there is some error message that briefly displays at the top of the screen after you log in, but not long enough to read it. It looks like something about power management.