How to clean out ~/home

[Paul Kaplan]

Over several years of distro upgrades and installs, my ~/home directory has 
become a dumping ground for old and overly modified configuration files and 
other junk.

I suspect that something here is now interfering with kde and kde4 because I 
have some strange and unsolved kde3 and kde4 problems when using this ~/home 
directory.  However these problems don't occur if I create a new_user on the 
system.

Short of deleting and rebuilding ~/home can someone make some suggestions for 
a systematic but reasonably safe way of eliminating the unused junk while not 
eliminating essential files.  (Please don't recommend deleting .kde...I've 
tried that and it doesn't help...The problem is almost certainly at the top 
level of ~/home.)

Thanks,
Paul