OK, I shall eat my words against Mandrake. I was EXTREMELY irritated with the problem that I just couldn't resolve. The problem doesn't appear to be Mandrake, per se, but something about KDE and hostnames. The problem appears to have been related to my hostname. One suggestion about the source of my problem (incredibly slow KDE app startup and inability to run MandrakeUpdate at all) was that it was dns-related. Thus, my apologies. I had already tried everything else I could think of to no avail (reinstalling kde2, upgrading kde, rebuilding the kernel, rebuilding qt2, killing aRts, and so forth). It became known to me (can't recall where among all this) that KDE and Gnome, which I installed after running into the KDE problem, had a problem with my hostname. I fixed it by just renaming my system localhost.localdomain. I didn't get a chance to test much - only konsole - before I had to step out to work for a bit but it appeared that after changing my hostname, the long delay between starting a KDE app and it appearing and being useable went away. Instead of the 25 seconds it had been taking for konsole to start, it took about 5 seconds after the hostname change. This only affected things if I actually started KDE and tried to run KDE apps. It did not affect the function or speed of any non-KDE apps. It also did not affect kde apps if started from an xterm (failsafe). Can anyone enlighten me as to why a hostname problem would affect only KDE apps and only after starting a full-blown KDE session? Is this actually in the nature of linux or X or is it tied to the wm/apps/environment? It would appear to be KDE specific, in my experience thus far, because though after I installed gnome and started up a gnome session, it complained about my hostname, it did not affect the running of various apps. I will be home again soon and will be able to testrun kmail, and a few other apps to see if the slow-starting has disappeared generally.
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