Sounds like the kde session manager may have crashed, stalled and another
copy got loaded.
I'm not experienced enough with the internals of KDE to give you a deffinate
hypothesis.
A lot has changed from 3.5 up to 4.2.

Buntu is starting to become more like Slackware.



On Tue, May 19, 2009 at 6:38 PM, Ralf Philipp <email address hidden> wrote:

> Hi there,
>
> I've the same problems with kubuntu and jaunty on a minimac with 945G.
> After googling around I found different proposals. To get some solutions
> to work I opened a file with 'sudo kate' from konsole. Kate was starting
> but I got an error-message like this 'Could not start ksmserver. Check
> your installation.'. After clicking OK to that message kdm (xorg?) is
> doing a restart. After logging in back everything is going smooth.
> glxgears makes 1100 fps (former 400fps) and all the dasktop effects and
> 3d-games are working well. If I restart the machine I've again the slow
> and sluggish desktop. I reproduced this behaviour serveral times. I
> didn't touch any configuration files.
>
> --
> MASTER: Poor graphics performance on Intel
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/252094
> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
> of a duplicate bug.
>
> Status in X.org xf86-video-intel: Confirmed
> Status in “linux” source package in Ubuntu: New
> Status in “xserver-xorg-video-intel” source package in Ubuntu: In Progress
> Status in linux in Ubuntu Karmic: New
> Status in xserver-xorg-video-intel in Ubuntu Karmic: In Progress
>
> Bug description:
> I experience significant performance loss with ubuntu 8.10 alpha 3 with my
> Intel DG965WH based system and SVDO/ADD2 video card. Actually, the
> performance loss started with ubuntu 8.04.1; I upgraded to see if there was
> any performance gain with the new version. While "glxgears" produced values
> between 1580 fps and 1496 fps with ubuntu 7.04 and 7.10, respectively, now I
> can only achieve something like 445 fps with ubuntu 8.10 alpha 3. I get an
> error message when starting glxgears that "TTM" was not available and
> classic mode would be used. Similary, the flight simulator "flightgear"
> achieves frames rates of 1-2 fps only.
> My suspicion is that some of the hardware acceleration features of the
> X3000 system are not being used, and I don't know how to activate them with
> the new xorg.conf structure and the underlying automatic configuration
> approach.
> I would like to see the graphics performance go back to the values achieved
> in ubuntu 7.04 and 7.10.
> Your help / comment is greatly appreciated.
> Bingo
>
> [Update]
> Intel upstream has been in a multi-year effort to rearchitect X and the
> Intel 2D and 3D driver to provide better performance.  While this work is
> underway, people are seeing variations in performance levels from version to
> version, for a variety of reasons.  There are probably multiple unrelated
> bugs being reported in the comments here.
>
> It is important to note and remember that glxgears is *not* a benchmark
> tool.  It simply measures how fast the driver writes images to the screen,
> whereas most 3D applications are limited by render speed, not merely blit
> speed.  Instead use a 3D game (flightgear, tremulous, etc.) that has a real
> rendering workload to make comparisons.
>
> If you're definitely seeing performance problems and are able to narrow it
> to a specific cause, please do not comment onto this bug report - it's too
> lengthy and rambling already, and your issue will just be lost in the noise.
>  Instead, make a new report and please be as specific as possible with exact
> steps to reproduce and as much detail and logs as you can.  See
> http://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Reporting for tips on making a good X bug report.
>
> A troubleshooting guide, with additional background about performance
> issues on Intel is available at:
>
> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Troubleshooting/IntelPerformance
>



-- 
I tend to pee on things