Well, it's up and running with my preferred desktop background, most of the applications are back, such as this 'ere email client, without having to set up all the accounts etc, but I have a problem which appears to be intermittent. The icons at the top right of the windows, minimize, maximise and close, keep disappearing.
I'm very reluctant to go mucking about trying various files, just in case, so does anybody have any definite ideas as to what might be wrong please? The desktop is KDE 4.11 as I guess that's important. I've looked at, but not touched the plasma files in ~/.kde4/share/config but they don't seem to hold details of icons and the like.
As it's all now working and before it all goes nipple north again, I'm about to do another backup. That way, if it all should go wrong, I know I can get back to a working state without having to download tons of updates etc.