I had no luck at all with the getting the CVS kicker build to not flicker, setting transparencies and background images did absolutely zero (no background image, no transparency just the wonderful flicker). however thankfully kicker is one of the handful of KDE 3.2.1 packages that has made its way into sid and upgrading to those packages has fixed all of these issues.

as for debi's cooments it sounds like something i ran into a while back after upgrading kde. It sounds like xdm/kdm is up and running when that comes up and you log in the first time you have yo specify to log into KDE, which will then set KDE as the default, for some reason after upgrading at times the default widnow manager isn;t set and a login will kick you right back out.