Perhaps I was unclear. What worked for me was to remaster by booting in text mode (runlevel 2), create an empty /home/knoppix, trasnfer teh contents of /etc/skel to /home/knoppix, chown and chmod them to be writeable and owned by knoppix, then make a .xinitrc file.

inside the file /home/knoppix/.xinitrc is:

startkde


Start x from chrooted environment as user knoppix using default configs that came from /etc/skel.

su knoppix
startx

Use KDE Control Center menu editor to edit the menus.

mv contents of /etc/skel to somewhere else (as a backup) in case of problems.

mv contents of /home/knoppix to empty directory /etc/skel. Delete empty directory /home/knoppix. Chown -R root:root and chmod -R 755 all files in /etc/skel.

Remaster and test.