And the winner of the bonehead move of the year: me!
While trying to get one of the GUI SILC (Secure Internet Live Conferencing) clients running, I successfully hosed the installation of the old OS (RedHat Linux 8.0). Silky requires that the newer Gtk+ and glib libraries be installed, and since the required version was not available in RPM format for the older RedHat 8.0 I had on the box, I compiled and installed the required libraries. This, of course, allowed Silky to run, but completely hosed the old libraries. So, when I rebooted the system, KDE could not find the versions it needed, and dumped out on me.
So now, despite the fact that I have been meaning to upgrade the system OS for quite some time, I’m installing SusE 9.0 sooner that I truly intended. Hopefully, within an hour or so I’ll know how the install went.