kde 3.1 oddness

[mnewman]

I have KDE 3.1 running with it's own window manager. I have four desktops. If I start any process running in other than the first one, xquartz immediately grabs over 2GB of vm:

Processes:  71 total, 3 running, 2 stuck, 66 sleeping... 141 threads   16:52:32
Load Avg:  1.88, 1.36, 1.22     CPU usage:  68.7% user, 30.7% sys, 0.6% idle
SharedLibs: num =  107, resident = 13.8M code, 1.75M data, 5.75M LinkEdit
MemRegions: num = 5621, resident =  597M + 7.76M private, 50.6M shared
PhysMem:  63.8M wired,  463M active,  232M inactive,  758M used, 9.30M free
VM: 5.49G + 55.5M   36867(1) pageins, 1024877(0) pageouts        

  PID COMMAND      %CPU   TIME   #TH #PRTS #MREGS RPRVT  RSHRD  RSIZE  VSIZE
  611 Terminal    71.7%  0:11.83   4    91   171  1.63M+ 5.17M  9.09M+  108M+
  202 Window Man   8.0%  0:25.97   3   322   935  2.59M- 12.6M  14.1M+  175M+
    0 kernel_tas   7.4%  0:41.93  27     0     -      -      -  51.7M   593M 
   81 dynamic_pa   6.8%  0:09.99   1    10    15    24K   292K    44K  1.29M 
  621 top          3.2%  0:14.57   1    14    18   248K   312K   352K+ 13.6M 
  712 Xquartz      2.6%  0:13.18   5   134   199   570M  10.0M  92.6M  2.12G 
  543 Safari       0.8%  0:10.31   6   125   243  2.75M  5.80M  7.25M   121M 
  739 kdeinit      0.5%  0:03.31   1    15    92   924K  12.9M  6.77M  95.6M 
  393 loginwindo   0.0%  0:06.96   5   162   177  2.31M  4.82M  4.61M  99.4M
  189 ATSServer    0.0%  0:05.34   2    40   201   332K- 2.14M+ 1.21M+ 39.5M 
  503 LaunchBar    0.0%  0:04.06   2    92   187  3.67M  4.64M  9.39M   111M
  764 kdeinit      0.0%  0:03.92   1    15   143  1.80M  15.7M  11.1M   100M
  505 PTHClock     0.0%  0:03.59   2    67   117   500K  3.88M  3.67M   105M
  771 kdeinit      0.0%  0:02.19   1    15   115  1.94M  14.2M  10.6M  98.5M
  496 Finder       0.0%  0:02.72   2    87   218  1.49M  8.65M  9.28M   125M

Clearly this is not normal. It causes massive pageouts and the entire machine slows to a crawl. What have I done wrong?

[mnewman]

Well, I solved the above memory problem by completely deleting all the KDE config files.

Now I have another problem. When I try to run KMail I get a message saying that KDEinit could not launch Kmail.

I tried trashing the Kmail config files and reinstalling Kmail binaries using Fink. Same error.

Any ideas?

Although I solved the memory leak problem described above, I still can't get KDE to create multiple desktops. No matter what number I try to set it to KDE ignores it and reverts back to the dafault 1.

I am running KDE with it's own WM.