The trick I'm looking for is probably getting the kde support environment up and running as the desktop boots so that the KDE apps can take advantage of Sycoca etc. Anyone know how?

One slight tangent ... at home, I run on a P90 with 32 Mb RAM, and I use blackbox_kde on Mandrake 7. This is a sort of 'KDE' aware slim line window manager ... may be worth a look (I forget the URL, but google should provide). The main point though, is that this wm is linking into KDE somehow, so it may be worth browsing the blackbox site to see how this is done, or maybe looking at what is running when blackbox runs ... I find that kmail takes a little time (few seconds) to start though - so this may or may not help ... (Netscape takes an age - but thats just netscape ...) Just a thought. Kevin. kevin@northants.lug.org.uk (please don't use my alstom address anymore for email, this will be inactive in a weeks time ...)