Full marks for points 1 to 3. Not so sure about the scatological final 2 points.

I've been running KDE 4 from the MAXI edition and that isn't running with Compiz anyway. No problems with missing window frames.

When I've an unresponsive keyboard and a blank screen at work (where Knoppix is running in a Virtual Box) the following often works: press ctrl-alt-f1 to switch to the console window ... count to 10 very, very slowly ... repeat if nothing happens ... when-and-if the console window wakes up ... press ctrl-alt-f5 to switch back to the GUI.