kdm oddity

[pkaplan1 at comcast.net]

I've been trying to run kde4.1 and have been met with some very strange desktop behavior in a multihead laptop configuration.  I recently discovered that this appears to be related to how kde 4.1 is launched.

If I launch 4.1 from kdm3, the kde4.1 desktop is displayed in a (wrong) way that is difficult to describe.  Only parts of the desktop are active.  Apparently the internal display contents are placed on the external display and vice versa with one result being that the desktop cashew is off screen somewhere.  Also, many attempts to move panels result in 4.1 crashing.

However, when I kill kdm and launch kde4.1 with:

startx /usr/lib/kde4/bin/startkde  I get a well behaved kde 4 desktop.  Interestingly as well a number of kde 3 system tray apps (knetload, smb4k 0.9.3 and guidance-power-manager) appear in the 4.1 system tray (I thought they weren't supposed to be able to run in 4.1).

Is this a bug in kdm3?  Has anyone else noticed this?  How about with kdm4 or another dm?

Paul