Thats really odd guys, just now this is what I did?

I loaded brand spanking new flash 10-7
untarred KDE from root
Booted and I thought it had crash, not sure if it actually did? I used the power button and turned off the n800.
I booted back up, installed becomeroot, osso-xterm, openssh-installer
logged in via ssh
ran stopmaemo
KDE started
rebooted
started KDE from the menu and it works

and my system just crashed and burned...ok what the heck was that....it just rebooted for no reason. And it rebooted again, after KDE was started again. I am up and running now though? And I appear to be stable. Here is what I think I am experiencing. The audio in KDE is set to autodetect. After it crashed several times on me, when KDE finished comming up the last time, it had an error saying that it could not start the audio, or something. I restarted again, and started KDE again. It ran for a while and rebooted again.

I think arts is the culprit, there must be something different in the way dsp is behaving in the new OS.

These two processes seem to be respawning, which means they are crashing, I think artsd is messing with the dsp processes, causing reboot.

1698 root 1128 S /usr/sbin/dsp_dld -p --disable-restart -c /lib/dsp/ds
1768 user 5976 S /usr/local/kde/bin/artsd -F 10 -S 4096 -s 60 -m artsm

If you can bootup and get to ssh, start kde, and manually kill the arts processes.

Nokia-N800-51:~# ps -fe | grep arts
1405 user 5608 S /usr/local/kde/bin/artsd -F 10 -S 4096 -a null -s 60
1436 root 232 R grep arts
Nokia-N800-51:~# kill -9 1405

There may be more than one process, kill all the arts processes. Now inside KDE go to "Control Center" > Sound System > Hardware Tab > "select the audio device" select "No Audio Input/Output" Then hit Apply. Seems to make me stable.

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Can you verify if this is your problem?

What exactly happens when you start kde from the menu, does the screen turn black? does the splash screen display, does the desktop load with icons. Are you rebooting it or does it crash? How long are you waiting after you click the KDE icon?

Larry when you run stopmaemo, as user "user" are you saying after matchbox stop runs, "ps | grep matchbox" shows it running? There is a small lag between when matchbox stops and kwin starts. the splash screen is displayed before kwin starts.