Rescuing a messed up Plasma desktop

[Nigel Ridley]

I just had a slight major problem: I had just closed Firefox and the window turned white but did 
not close. The close button was unresponsive so I pressed 'Alt + Ctrl + Esc' and got the 'skull 
and crossbones' which I then moved into the [white] Firefox window and clicked - apparently 
Firefox wasn't actually there - but the Plasma desktop was! I killed the Plasma Desktop and no 
matter what I tried - logout; reboot; cold reboot - the desktop wouldn't load - just a black 
screen :-(
So I did a 'Alt + Ctrl + Delete' and got the 'Leave' options; logged out and then a 'Alt + Ctrl + 
F1' to get to TTY1; logged in and then 'mv .kde kdeOLD' - logged out, 'Alt + Ctrl + F7' and 
logged into a brand new Plasma desktop :-)
I then spent half an hour getting my dektop the way I like it, then I copied my new .kde to 
another folder, renamed it .kdeGOOD and copied it back into my home folder. Now if I managed to 
mess things up again I can just rename my .kdeGOOD to .kde and everything should be good again....

Hope this helps someone else.

Nigel