> Good call,
> 
>   kcontrol is doing it's job, it looks like the problem
> is in kate/kwrite not respecting what is in the user-dirs.dirs file:
> 
> 23:28 valkyrie:~> cat .config/user-dirs.dirs
> XDG_DOCUMENTS_DIR[$e]="/home/david/"

How about other apps? Kate and Kwrite share much in common.

Possibly temporarily rename katerc and kwriterc and try again. I have had some troubles with both in my migrations from KDE3 to TDE. I think the files get corrupted. I haven't spent much time narrowing which elements in the files are confusing the TDE versions. I think the [$Version] group is one. Just delete the whole group section from the rc file.

Also delete the [KFileDialog Settings] group section.

See what happens.

Darrell