>Oh, it's autostarting every time - it just comes up with a big red 
>X over it and
>and it is dead as a doornail. Can't find any mixer, nothing..

Place the following at the top of kmixrc:

Autostart=false

The key and value goes at the top of the rc file. No group category.

Then with no autostarting, after Trinity starts, open konsole and 
start kmix manually. Hopefully the stdout/stderr provides a clue.

Darrell