ALL KDE settings gone, reverted back to fresh install

[convict]

Long-ish story not much shorter: a program malfunctioned, memory usage climbed to max before I realised what it was doing and system essentially froze once it started hitting the swap. So I ended up doing a hard reset.

Now, the problem... KDE has essentially reset itself to some kind of default state, everything seems to be as I remeber it was ofter a fresh install. All settings (mouse handedness, keyboard shortcuts, power management, desktop effects & appearance settings, KDE wallet settings & passwords, wireless networks) are gone as are my Kickoff favorites (it's got the default System Settings, Dolphin and Konqueror trio) and the settings (and history/recent documents etc.) of every single KDE application I have opened (Dolphin, KWrite, Konqueror and KDevelop to name a few), which is darn annoying to say the least. Even worse, it's lost ALL of my activities, and now all I have are the 4 lame defaults. Strangely enough, all non-KDE applications (so far I've used NetBeans, Firefox and LibreOffice writer) are unaffected - it seems like some kind of catastrophic KDE-wide meltdown that I have no explanation for.

Does anyone know what I could do to get my system back the way it was?

[RANT] I'm one unlucky sucker to be sure, ever since KDE4 came out I've always had some problems with it and now that the Gnome team has officially abandoned the use of sense and reason, my options are beginning to feel a bit... narrow. This is really making me ponder the virtues of lightweight/minimalistic DEs...

[marriedto51]

Almost all the KDE settings would be in the directory ~/.kde somewhere. Would you be able to restore this directory from a recent backup?

The menu entries are defined in different places: ~/.local/share/applications contains the desktop files that define the menu entries, but the menu itself is defined in ~/.config/menus/. Again, you might need to restore the contents of these directories.

[convict]

Unfortunately, no, all I ever back up is personal documents. I've pretty much set everything back up anyway. Thanks for the response, though. I might change my backup plan to cover my entire home partition.

[sea]

Do you find a ~/.config, ~/.local or as ~/.kde with an addition of bak, org or simliar in your home dir?

As you'd like to test out some minimal DE, i'd suggest to have a look at either XFCE (not that minimal anyhow), LXDE (openbox), awesome (lua) or e16 uses something else i dont recall, but its incredible fast while using half the resources of lxde!
EDIT: A little advertise, my script collection aims to build an 'as minimal as possible while trying to offer maximal functionality' from Fedora's default minimal install (196 packages), and offering the DE's e16 and awesome. Awesome is much less fancy, but also very fast. Uploading a hotfix in about an hour of this post's time.

[convict]

I've had xfce installed for a while and used it every now and again, I certainly do like it but I kind of miss KWin (I really like window tiling, drag to top to maximise and the customisability), and there are other funny glitches too. I suppose I could just use KWin instead of the xfce window manager, but IIRC last time I did it was very glitchy under xfce. As for E16, tried that too but it seems to have no clue of multiple monitors and there were some other annoyances too (had to change mouse handedness using xmodmap and wireless didn''t work automatically, I had to conjure up some wpa_supplicant magic from the terminal again) so it kinda put me off. I'll definitely play around some more, though, I have a habit of running into weird issues that nobody is aware existed and that mysteriously disappear the next time I try it (go figure).

As for baks or orgs, nope, didn't find any.