I wanted to do this, so I went to Menu -> Configuration -> Configure computer.

I changed login to KDE and set it to autologin.

But no matter what I do, it always boots into Gnome, and it does NOT autologin. And at the login screen, it just has fields for userId and password. I seem to remember an option here to choose which desktop, but I don't see that anymore.

Also, I can't shutdown or restart cleanly. Sometimes, when I select Shutdown or Restart, it just logs off and gets to the same login screen (without any desktop selection capability).

that is strange. boot to GNOME then press alt-ctrl-backspace that should get you to a command prompt then type this command

startx kde

of if that doesn't work

xinit
kde

the kde may be KDE in both of those...don't know. When you get into KDE set it to auto login...it is also possible that you didn' tinstall KDE when you installed mandrake.

Thanks - I'll try that. I KNOW I installed KDE because I've used KDE. I'm switching between them because I'm a newbie, so I'm still learning the details of both trying to figure out which I like better.

It almost feels like something got corrupted in my Gnome setup because autologin has no effect whether I say to boot into KDE or not autologin at all.

Any other ideas what could have happened with Gnome?

I had a very similar problem when I was using Mandrake 9.1, where everything I tried to get the computer to load KDE instead of GNOME at startup failed miserably. I finally was given the advice to solve it this way:

In your home directory, there's a file .desktop with line DESKTOP=GNOME. Just replace gnome with KDE.

The person giving me the advice assured me it worked for them on Mandrake 9.2

Cool - I will try that!

That worked like a charm!