kicker vanishes on startup

Hi all, Yesterday, without doing anything special, the KDE panel stopped working. It is nowhere to be found, although 'ps aux' shows that kicker is running. Killing the process and restarting it gives the following warning (not an actual crash, but effectively one :) ) kicker: WARNING: cannot open extension:  because of Library files for ".la" not found in paths. I don't remember changing anything in the paths. Using SuSE 9.2, KDE 3.3.92 from cvs. I have tried recompiling kdebase etc, but the problem seems to be persisting, and is not a problem of the specific user, since root sees the exact same thing. Does anyone else see this and know what to do? Otherwise, everything seems to be working fine with KDE. Thank you, Chris