8.10 upgrade and KDE

[stan]

I have a machine that I ultimately intend to become my primary workstation
at hoe, but that ay present amounts to a test machine. I use KDE sessions
on most of my machines.

Yesterday, I upgraded this machine from 8.04 to 8.10. I had a minor problem
with tsdoc (which, since I don't know what it is) I just deleted. The
upgrade seemed to go fairly well, but plasma seems to die on a regular
basis. More importantly I had spent a good bit of time configuring the
panel on the bottom of the sessions to have quite a number of useful applets.

These did not survive the upgrade. When I try adding in applets now, I get
_very_ large icons at the top of my desktop, instead of on the panel
itself. Also, there does not seem to be as wide a selection of applets. Can
I change this behavior to be more like this older version of KDE? How can I
add an application launcher for things like xterm?

-- 
One of the main causes of the fall of the roman empire was that, lacking
zero, they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C
programs.