Installed the updated kdelibs and kdebase packages. Cleaned house to restore baselines.
Regarding the previous reports:
1. Trinity still creates a /root/.kde3 directory for root. As far as I can tell, Trinity is using /root/.kde because everything is performing as expected. A huge improvement! :)
Some snooping revealed that the only directories in /root/.kde3 are the cache, socket, and tmp directories. The same directories exist in /root/.kde too. I deleted all six directories and restarted X. All six were recreated.
I restored the snippet I had in startkde to create the KDEROOTHOME environment variable on-the-fly. That stopped the creation of the /root/.kde3 directory.
Something still remains awry.
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2. There is no ~/.xsession-errors file being created. I had those files this afternoon when we were debugging. What happened to the file? Looks like a regression there.
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3. I temporarily removed the "1>&2" redirects from startkde so I would have stdout on the screen. I did not see anything abnormal.
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4. I changed the "1>&2" redirects to "2>&1" so I might see error messages. I did not see any of those I reported previously, but I would be more assured if I saw a proper xsession-errors file.
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5. hplip-systray still starts. Something is bothering me about this nonsense. This was a nuisance several years ago and I cannot remember what I did to stop the train. I don't think KDE ever honored the XDG ~/.config/autostart directory. Hence, the recent startkde tweak to add that directory probably does not help. Probably should undo that tweak.
Hopefully something in the fogs of my mind surface to help me remember the magic from a few years ago. Rest assured that when I remember the solution we will document the resolution somewhere!
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6. The problem with creating a .directory file in the root of the file system is gone.
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7. I'm not seeing the "xset: bad font path element" nuisance message.
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Let's figure out what happened to the xsession-errors file so we can be sure that most of these problems are history.
I hope that helps!
Darrell