recent gutsy updates broke my pam config (maybe)

[Art Alexion]

I have been running gutsy for a month or two without insurmountable 
problems ... until this past weekend's updates.

After a kernel update I rebooted.  Now I can't log into KDE, and I am having 
problems in the console; specifcally cifs errors , 

	CIFS VFS: cifs_mount failed w/return code = -13
	mount error 13 = permission denied
	...
	[manpage info (manpage not really helpful here)]
	...
	pmvarrun: creating /var/run/pam-mountpmvarrun parsed count value 0


When I try to log onto KDE I get a small, non-KDE dialog informing me that 
kstartupconfig would not start.  Dismissing it by hitting OK results in X 
restarting.

When I try to run kstartupconfig from a console I get
	trying to create local folder /home/art/.kde/share: permission denied
repeated 4 times.

Even though the owners of ~/.kde are art:art and the permissions are 
	drwx------
I don't have permission to browse as regular user.

I think the recent pam updates broke the changes I had made with sadms to 
configure a domain login.  I made backups of the files I edited 
in /etc/pam.d, but I don't want to restore them unless I can't otherwise fix 
this.

Anyone else with the same problem or any ideas?