Thank you all for the replies.
I have not had the time to try the latest suggestions, but will do so shortly and report the results.
Neural: What I did to get a KDM login prompt was actually very dumb. I did a dist-upgrade, and you'll notice that this adds a whole bunch of links to your rc folders for different daemons that will get started at bootup. For us using Knoppix, this is very annoying because we have to now go and delete these links leaving only the original Knoppix ones. I did the reverse: I backed up my Knoppix links and left the ones installed by dist-upgrade (including the kdm one) This left me after bootup at a KDE login prompt and I was able to login into my desktop. However, since the hardware autodetection did not run, my ethernet cards were not configured. The other problem was that the other 4 terminals were still logged in automatically and as root: so much for increasing the security of my system with a login prompt! But in any event, as far as getting a working system, I think that if I fiddle with it enough, setting up my hardware manually, I should be able to have a working system that drops me at a login prompt and all the hardware setup. I am still stumped on how to get the other terminals not to login as root though. I tried what shah suggested with the initlevel, but that did not work: Instead, I was unable to go into KDE at all, so I still don't have a solution for this.