Hi,
KDE does have some strange issues at the moment. An example is that on one of my laptops, kcontrol is empty but Lost and Found contains all the links for kcontrol. So maybe there is more to this than just that? Or maybe your problem is tied to this? But it's just a guess.
I am not sure if it is related, but I did have that problem... But for that I found a fix: http://people.debian.org/~terpstra/message/20061113.010424.5d69fba1.en.html (Maybe look at previous messages too.) Thanks, Luis